Course

Come to the final presentation for CTIN 534 and hear all about the Big Card Game put on by the Experiments in Interactivity class. A full post-mortem of the design process for the game, the production process and video from the event itself will be shown in the ZML Thursday at 7PM. Don't go home just because you've been working or taking finals all day ... come play with us!

ZML 7PM Thursday

Interactive Media Division Students Plan:

“Big Game”

in Founder’s Park
Wednesday, 30 November 2005
Noon-3pm

Big Game is coming to the University of Southern California! Playing cards that are inappropriately big have been sighted around Founder's Park - there are signs that this Wednesday afternoon there will be some kind of wild public play.

Check the listing on the USC Events Calendar.

Courtesy of David Lopez and Tracy's playful hordes, a time-lapsed view of last year's New Games / Snoopy Thanksgiving celebration - which you might find actually as useful as it is entertaining as you go about envisioning the world's first truly Big Card Game event.

To see the clip, click here and either download the zipped file (22.4 megs) or click and wait very patiently to see it online.

FY Giant-Card-Designing I - see this.

In answer to too-oft-unasked question "what should I play with the family this weekend" see, perhaps this.

Play on!

Mondo Croquet - played with bowling balls and sledge hammers.... (sent in as a comment to my story on Collosal Croquet)

A little semi-relevant inspiration from today's LA Times, this article "(Water) Gun-Toting Assassins" It's Just Some Urban Fun- points also to this website.

FY further I, see their rules for Capture the Flag. Not that you should necessarily abandon the "Big Games" concept, but rather to help you get an idea of how such an event is organized. Most fortuitous. Most relevant. And not exceptionally reverent.

see this guy around campus?
take your picture with him.

email the picture to picr@bud.com
check here to see it go up

the most popular picture wins a prize!

Life by the fire

It was very exciting experience to watch my team's game played in a playtest room. It was more than just watching what we expected players to do when we were designing it. It was the moment that a game meeting players and being evolved by their creative input. I think the success of this type of game actually depends in large part on the team chemistry of the players. Designers are like preparing little clew or inspiration for them and rest of it is up to players. In terms of that, I think we had great players (Rick,Justin,Josh) for testing our game. It actually felt like having audition for actors.

The weekness of our game I noticed during playtest was that it felt a little bit too long for the player to prepare their turn. Though, the time gave players to think about right timing for up and down of their narration according to that of the selected music. But actually I want to see players starting narration right away after checking the written card and drawing. Players can improvise their narration when the music changes its tone. I think it can be a pleasant challenge for the players while speeding up the pace of the game. I think it's enough to listen for like 10 sec. to get the feeling of the ambience music and it will be better even share the first 10 sec. of the music together with co-players. I want to revise the rule to have music always going on(by making the i-pod play random track automatically) and when the music goes to next track, the next player immediately starts their story. To make it possible I think players need to have their cards already chosen and think about next story while listening to previous player's story. Unexpected music will make even more fun situation that the next player might need to change their ideas prepared during previous turn.

What I like most about our game is the music part. I think music is a really great inspiration for players. I often notice that same narration with different music will make a totally different experience.

Chong Qing

I think using movie footages for narration is a really great idea. Though, I couldn't really get how the the answers for the questions change the movie. I noticed that choosing between walk and ride actually changes the editing faster paced but not that obviously. I tried to use the words from questions(east/west, work/ridem, man/machine) to make a story. I felt like I would prefer to have more options(words) to come up with a story. I'm kind of confused because I thought it's trying to make a narration watching the film but it was not clear when we should start talking because the movie kept going on and I found players kept watching it rather than saying something about it. I think we were more like trying to understand how the answer s we chose affected the film and we mainly talked about that rather than trying to make a story out of that. The choice of footage was I think really ambient. It was more about the background than specific characters. So I assumed that this is kind of first person view of storytelling. It was interesting to find myself trying to use some visual elements like color, shape, movement used as cinematic language to come up with my own story out of them. It was totally opposite experience of having a story and trying to make a film from it.

I think this game has lots of potential to be a great interactive movie. I think if designers want players to make stories out of it, it needs to be clear when to let players have moment to say something or input their creativity. Also I thought showing the film is sometimes giving too much information that actually limits imagination from the players and let them a little bit passive. But I think footages chosen was kind of ambient with lots of backgrounds rather than specific with certain characters or subjects I guessed that's to give more space to players come up with their own ideas.

Playtest Room Experience
As a player knowing that designers are watching myself or even recording and also the fact that we don't have much time for playing, I found co-players to be more analytic in playing the game. Actually because the nature of this types of game is based on performance, I think having audience(especially creators) for the performance is great motivation for their envolvement in the game. AlsoI think having a room like that really helps to have more focus on the game itself than playing in a space where other games are played together.

I enjoyed this playtest immensely. We wanted to create a game where the players had to make up their own stories based on a few pieces of inspiration, and that is somewhat of a risky proposition. If the players aren't into it, then the game is not going to work. Rick, Josh, and Justin did a fantastic job of creative storytelling and dealing with the cumbersome tech situation. It was so great when they kept up the tale-spinning between turns - that was something that we hoped would happen but didn't seem like something you could order your players to do when laying out the rules. Overall, I think the intended and emergent behavior during the game was incredibly successful.

I think the most interesting question that came up was how to handle story preparation. Josh asked for paper to jot down notes - I am torn on how to answer this request. To me, this game celebrates the tradition of oral storytelling and the passing on of tall tales and myth, and I am afraid that letting people write stuff down would lead to the reading of written stories, which is a different feeling entirely. Also, we structured the game so you could only tell one tiny story about your friend (the musical pieces were only 1.5 minutes long), and you had the sentence and picture to use as reference points. Also, I think in a setting where the players have the time to go around and around and tell lots of stories there wouldn't be as much pressure felt to make your story the best story possible - our playtesters may have felt that they would only have time to tell one story during the test and so been nervous about making sure that it was a quality one.

The question of how to handle the music previewing was interesting. All testers agreed that they didn't want to all preview at once because then they'd have to remember their stories and timing while the others went. But if each player is previewing for a couple minutes before their turn then there is the question of how to handle the dead time. Maybe this is something that having more players would solve - maybe with four or five players the continuation of the tale-spinning would be more engaging. Maybe real marshmallows would help too.

We tried to bite off a lot with this project, and probably should have scoped the project better, but we were passionate about trying something new and were following a kick in the ass as far as class ambition goes. Even after two weeks of technical hurdles in MAX and Jitter, we unfortunately had to present an unfinished piece. Because of this, we definitely want to do a repeat playtest at some point.

We asked a series of questions, and used the results to generate a video database narrative. They were the following:

East or West?
Man or Machine?
Walk or Ride?

"East or West?" seemed to be mostly interpreted in terms of culture rather than direction.

Players focused on individuals that appeared in different clips and seemed to try and tie them together into a narrative. This was interesting and educational as far as how people construct narrative and what they look for.

Players discounted the experience when it didn't show what they expected (e.g. "machines" when they chose "man") and when it showed the same series of clips on replay with different answers to the questions.

There seemed to be confusion about whether the camera's point of view was first person or otherwise, and whether it was suppose to be consistent or not.

I'd love to explain, but I won't for now.

The following came to me from my friend Garry Shirts, author of Star Power. I thought it might prove worthy of our collective consideration at some time:

I've been thinking about your replayability comment and StarPower. I think that is one of the differences between simulations and games. I think of myself as designing simulations rather than games. For me, the essence of designing a simulation is to try to capture the essence of some process, or reality that exists in the real world. Simlations may be designed for many different purposes. A Physical simulation is often used to make predictions about how a system will work. For instance, a simulation of a harbor might be designed to determine how sand will be deposited in the harbor. I think of many films as simulations of reality. Their purpose is to entertain. many books in my opinion are designed as simulations of a reality. I design simulations to help people learn about some aspect of real life. StarPower is designed to help people understand how power changes the way people behave and are perceived. In my mind it's closer to a film or a book with regard to the issue of replayability (not purpose).

Most people do not see a film more than once or read a book more than once. Replayability I think is very important for games, but for me it is not something I strive for in designing a simulation. I want the simulation to serve as a springboard to learning about the real world. There are simulations that are so rich and complicated that they might be replayed many times, but that's not something I strive for. I want them to move on to thinking about, learning about the real world. In other words, I see the simulation as a tool to look at the world differently.

I think that is a fundamental difference between games and simulations or simulation games. Most people don't play games to learn something, they play games to have fun, to enjoy the challenge of winning, of competing . I would feel that I had failed as a designer if my games were played just for fun. If they have fun that's fine, but that's not the primary outcome that I hope to create. If they didn't have fun, but learned something, I would consider the experience a success. Whereas, I think most people who design games would not.

I think where you and I resonate is in the area of creativity and problem solving. For me, if participating in a simulation or playing a game increases a person's ability to create or enjoy the process of creation or it gives them experience in solving problems, or it provides a more honest and rich interaction among the participants. , I would consider that a learning expereience and a great success.

=======

Here's my response:

And when I look at your games, I think of how fun they are, how they make me want to play, completely, openly, even though I know I might be fooled into learning something. They are so much fun that I am willing to drop my guard and engage in them fullly, despite their ineveitable educational value.

Watching Bad Company get playtested was scary. Agonizing. Mentally torturous.

After our discussion in class last week, I felt eager to try and break away from the weight I was feeling from the word "mod". I wanted to find a way to bend the project to something I could get excited about. I like building interactive applications and its something I wish I had more opportunities to do so I thought a bit about what was interesting about the Eden game to me in more abstract terms.

There were two key things that I liked about our game of Eden. One was the collaborative nature of the game. To invoke the DeKoven lexicon, perhaps the game more co-liberative than collaborative. We all sat in a circle and took turns constructing stories. I think I wanted to take this and make it a bit more collaborative in a way where the stories we were constructing would bear traces of everyone's participation. The other thing that I found compelling in Eden was the use of free association. I had my three cards and I intuitively figured out their sequence.

So the goal I had in mind of the conception of my idea was a collaborative, free-associating story constructor. My source for content: the infinite depths of the world wide web via the Google API. I'll walk through the interaction step by step.

The system prompts for a number of players so that it can coordinate the interaction accordingly.

The first player is asked to begin a sentence. They are free to begin the sentence with as many words as they want, but for the sake of the collaborative efforts should leave the sentence pretty open for other players to contribute to.

The beginning of the sentence that the first player typed is displayed at the top of the screen. The last word in that sentence is fed into google and the program fills the screen with words from the first page result that this word yielded.

The next player chooses a word from this pool of words and drags it onto the end of the partially formed sentence at the top of the screen. They are asked if this is the end of the sentence or not. If it is not the end of the sentence, the word the player picked is fed into google and a new pool of words arrives and the next player repeats the process until the sentence is finished.

If it is decided that this is the end of the sentence, the second player (that is the player after the person who began the first sentence) begins a new sentence and the whole sentence building process begins again.

After each player in the game has had the opportunity to begin a completed sentence, the story is finished and is displayed in full on the screen.

Thats the basic gist of it. You'll be able to try it for yourself in class on Thursday. I think that it could use a little more structure to guide people, but I'm not totally sure where. I've experimented with limiting the search results to pages on wikipedia and thought a bit about including extra search terms in the background (maybe even Eden, Adam, Even, Serpent in honor of the original Eden game), but I'm not sure. If you've got any suggestions, I welcome them and could probably even have some of them implemented to try out in the demo on thursday.

Bluffing and hidden information are two game mechanics that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Since bluffing is often employed as a desperation strategy, this mechanism seems especially appropriate in a game where players are trying to move beyond their existing social station by any means possible.

In my Asshole mod – Clusterfuck – players are assigned a social status that is kept secret from other players. Since no one knows what anyone’s position in the hierarchy is, they can pretend to be someone more important than they really are.

A-hole meets Monopoly with a taste of Pacheezy.

At the inception of Pigeonhole, each player is randomly assigned one of four colors. This "base" color stays with you the entire game. Similar to the card game played in class, Pigeonhole has a defined hierarchy, but instead of players changing labels at the end of each round, the hierarchy itself changes. Color hierachy (most powerful to least powerful): White, Yellow, Brown, Black. During the course of the game, one can change his/her genetic makeup (the computer keeps track of all that complex math). The goal of the game is to move on up in the world if you are the bottom 3 colors, and if you're White, you have to fight to stay on top while avoiding interaction w/ the other colors.

Once four players join any one server, the game can begin.

One can gradually increase his/her Social Acceptance by:
- buying various items, ranging from furniture to cars
- purchasing a marriage card - allows you to move up one social class by marrying into the next highest color; each time it is bought, it costs exponentially more; once you marry a player of a higher color, both your genetic makeup changes (eg: each is 50% one color and 50% the other).

Currency can be earned just like Monopoly, by investing into properties/locales you land on (given that you have enough funds at the time). If you fall on the same spot as another player, and it is advantageous for you to marry the other player, you may do so if you can afford the marriage card.

While each player will have a total amount of liquid assets, the only tally that matters is the individual amount Social Acceptance points.

The games have timed limits, and the person w/ the highest Social Acceptance rating at the end wins.

To make things more interesting, 8, 16, or 32 player servers would allow for multiple players of the same color (the server take care of evening up teams). This would potentially introduce rivalry between same color players and would allow for periods of cooperative play.

Thought this might be of interest to people in the Experiments class, and our section on interactive narrative.

via dataisnature

You are a rising star in Hollywood. You need to get the public's attention and approval - namely in the form of box office returns. You also want to get the attention of the Academy and receive the most precious of all human honors: an Oscar. But you face many dangers. There is the Hollywood hierarchy, that cruelly demands homage and favors to those better and brighter than you. There are other stars out there trying to rise faster than you, trying to keep your face in oblivion, trying to steal your fans away to their own premieres. There is the fickle public, who will get bored with you if you are too popular or too confined in your choice of roles. And then there is good old Lady Luck. You must fight your way past all these perils in Sleepy Spring, Blockbuster Summer, Eclectic Fall, and Oscar-bait Winter. All along the way you face reviews of your performances, but after all four seasons you face the one review to rule them all: the Academy Awards.

Each season is played as a round of Asshole, but the cards are not normal playing cards. The deck of 60 cards contains:

10 tv ads (value of 1)
10 billboards (value of 2)
8 product endorsements (value of 3)
8 talk show appearances (value of 4)
6 exclusive magazine interviews (value of 5)
6 publicity stunts (value of 6)
4 expensive premiere parties (value of 7)
4 abandonments by delinquent significant others (value of 8)
2 critical acclaims (value of 9)
2 tabloid attacks (value of 10)

Note: the value of each item is indicated on the card so players don’t have to memorize the order of priority.

There are two views seen by the player. The first is their hand of cards and the present play laid on the table. The second view is after each play, the players see a cartoon view of Hollywood with publicity sprinkled all over it in response to the moves made during the game. Billboards, media screens, newspaper stands, etc. Cards that represent actions (e.g. talk show interviews) are displayed as movie clips from that action, then headlines shown on newsstands.

Play proceeds clockwise around the table from the player who starts the progression. Each player must play a card or set of matching cards (pair, three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind) of equal or greater to the play made by the previous player. Each time a play is made, the landscape of Hollywood is updated to reflect the promotional action chosen. For example, if someone plays a pair of billboards, a close up of the poster is displayed to all the players and then the landscape shows two large billboards of that poster overlooking the town. If a someone plays a publicity stunt, the players all get to see a clip of the stunt as shown on Fox News, and then that headline appears on the Variety newspaper dispensers. When no more plays can be made in the progression, the last person to play gets to start the next progression. The trump card in this deck is the tabloid attack, which places all other players in public disgrace and allows the person who played it to take control of the next progression. The player who goes out first had the best box office return for their opening weekend. There are no uncouth names for your star status, only cold hard numbers.

So far this game is simply Asshole with a different metaphor and amusing visuals. At the start of the next season, the lowest star must pay homage to the highest by sending them a gift of her two best cards. The highest star must then acknowledge the gesture with a polite nod of his two lowest cards. The second lowest sends a gift of one card to the second highest star, who will reciprocate similarly. The other stars mill about in their mediocrity. The major difference in this game is that the computer, playing as the general public, will take notice of how long you stay at the top of the box office. After two seasons the public starts to get sick of you and will turn a blind eye to your publicity attempts. To win a third season in a row you must finish while all other players have at least half of their cards left (indicating a really slow season). To sweep the year, you must win the fourth season despite donating your tabloid attacks to the second highest star. At the end of the four seasons, the Academy Awards are held. To be considered, you must have either swept the year, or have finished in the top two Winter box office positions after having not held either position in either Summer or Fall. If there is more than one qualified nominee, the award will go to the one with the best Winter position.

Basically, the point of these mechanics is to make it so that you don’t want to always be the top dog but need to pull yourself back up by the end of the game.

My Asshole mod is an online game entitled “Dancing Queen” for use with a console style DDR™ dance pad, Eyetoy™ camera unit and microphone. Each player is dealt a hand of “cards,” but instead of regular playing cards they are short patterns of dance moves, each with its own piece of music to go along with it. Instead of the four card suits of Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and Hearts, there are four different styles of music to dance to – Rave, Disco, Hip-Hop and House. Each dance card, as it increases in value, contains a more complex pattern of moves to complete. It is not possible to see the exact pattern of moves you are going to play when you put down a card, just the difficulty rating of the dance pattern. The music and dance combinations are procedurally generated, so it is not possible to memorize or get bored of the combinations. A “Two” is the most powerful card, but also dictates the most complex and flashy dance maneuver. Playing a Two will always involve not only intricate footwork, but a pattern of hand, body, and/or head movements, plus a timed vocal outburst. Depending on the difficulty level that the game is set at, more or less of these facets may apply.

Play proceeds as in a traditional game of “Asshole.” The person with the Two of Raves will begin the round, playing whatever card out of their hand they wish. Each player has a view of the video feed of the current dancer on their screens during that person’s turn. If this dancer is unsuccessful in their attempt, they are forced to take their card back, and play moves to the next player. If they complete the move successfully, the card is placed down, and the next player has to play either a higher valued card, a card of the same number with which to skip the following player, or choose to perform a “Combo.” A Combo necessarily involves a medley of two different types of music, which are made to flow seamlessly into each other when the player chooses this option. In a Combo pattern, there is not only a combination of the two patterns that the player chose, but a finale of an entirely different type of music, which is chosen at random from the game’s library of music algorithms. If a player performs a Combo, the following players must each play Combos as well, or else forfeit their turns. If all players forfeit their turns, the last winning player starts the next round. A two can always beat a combo, or any other pattern for that matter, but you better be ready to sweat for it!

The first person to win a round is dubbed the “Dancing Queen,” or “Dancing King” if applicable. Second place is “Boogie Master/Mistress,” and third is “Jumpin’ Jane” or “Jumpin’ Joe.” Fourth place is the “Stumblefunker,” and last place is the “Fatass.” The Dancing Queen/King gets the benefit of not only stealing the highest valued card from the Fatass, but also of creating a new dance move, which is inserted into the Fatass’s hand. No matter the actual difficulty of this pattern, it will always have a play value of three. This Queen/King can select the type of music this new move is going to be set to, and the music’s length, depending on how mean they want to be to the Fatass (maximum value is fixed). The Boogie Master/Mistress will also be able to record a move, for the Stumblefunker, but this move will not be able to involve arm movements, will have a shorter maximum length, and will have a play value of four. The Boogie Master will also not have the benefit of receiving a card from the Stumblefunker.

Play ends when everybody gets tired and sits down.

In thinking about the card game Asshole in a digital form, I wanted to give more feedback and emphasis to the hierarchical relationships. I immediately thought back to games of King of the Hill from childhood playgrounds and decided to borrow some of the action elements of this game, along with using the medieval characters of Kings, Jesters and Peasants as symbols of absolute power and extreme forms of classicism.

The platform is an online-networked Flash game between three players (though some of the players could be the computer). At the beginning of the game, players are represented by onscreen avatars atop three separate hills, each level with one another. Players are dealt a series of cards just like traditional Asshole, and select which ones to play. With each card that is gotten rid of, the player’s respective hill grows higher. The avatar’s expressions and emotions change as their hill height changes over the course of the game. Character animations and written dialogue appearing in comic book style bubbles add humor as players become more refined with regalia, or more disheveled and drunken and exchange humorous jokes and taunts. In addition, players can send instant messages to one another to issue insults and commands.

At the end of the first round, the winner climbs the central hill and dons a crown and robe as the King. The second person becomes the Court Jester and the third becomes the Drunk Peasant. The unloading of large numbers of cards in a single turn creates an opportunity for actions against other players. For example, the King can dump trash or sewage down the hill, the Jester can play a cruel joke on other players, blow fire, etc., and the Drunk Peasant can throw rotten fruit or rocks up at the King and Jester. Success at these actions would be determined by skill over targeting, somewhat like the game Worms, and would provide an additional method of climbing the hierarchical ladder.

At the end of each round, the player’s avatars switch their appropriate roles as in traditional Asshole. The Peasant or Jester ascend the hill, and can kick or throw the King off, put on the robe and crown and assume the thrown. The overall score for each is calculated by the amount of time one remains at certain levels, the speed with which they get rid of their cards, and the number of cards they get rid of with each turn. The higher the score, of course the higher the hill, along with chances for power-ups such as building catapults, moat obstacles, walls, castles, armor, shields, weapon upgrades, etc. These power-ups create the opportunity for players to increasingly maintain their advantage over their opponents. The drinking aspect of the card game is borrowed as well as players have the periodic opportunity to command other players to consume wine, thus decreasing the accuracy of their actions.

I want the new game happen in the club. It is nonsense and sickness, what if more nonsense and sickness...... hey, let's do Game Noir.

[Game Screen] Rough Sketch

[Digital Game]
In digital game, things like calculating scores and detecting special cases can be automated and that gives players convenience and trust by having the computer as a neutral host of the game. It seems to give designers more freedom to extend the original game into somewhat complicated one.

[MOD Game: Ask Mr. Hole]
I added a seperate deck of special cards which can be interesting variables to the original game. When a player puts same number card, instead of making next player skip the turn, the player can choose either to pick a card from the special card deck or to make the next player skip the turn. Alsothere is the other case that allows players to pick up the special card. It is when there is nobody who can go on. The player who put the last card can either start next turn or skip his turn and draw a special card.

Other then special cards, there is one more special rule. It is when a player puts a same number and color card. In this case, the player can have one more turn to put cards.

The contents of special cards are like below.

* Backward Card: Players should put less or equal number of the card to the card on the table. When there is nobody to put right card on that, the rule goes back to the original. Players should put bigger or equal number of card. The player who put this special card can start putting his card first at the same time.
* Exchange Card: The player who put this special card can exchange all of his cards with other players'. It will be better to exchange cards with a player who has least number of cards. When there are more than 1 person who has the least number of cards, then the player can choose among them.
* Give 2 more cards to opponents: The player who put this special card can make other opponents to have 2 more cards from the deck. The number of cards to put to other players can be tweaked to keep the balance of the game.

[Diagram for the game progress]

In class and on the blog, we've discussed using games as an expressive medium. I think that games have a strong potential to engage issues and ideas in a way that more passive forms cannot hope to. So I was thinking about this the other night and I thought that in modifying Presidents and Assholes, I might give a shot at relating the games sometimes sadistic/abusive dynamics to a contemporary issue that stirs up a lot of emotions. Tentatively (and ironically) titled "Global Democracy", this proposed digital modification of Presidents and Assholes stems from a change of role names:

President ---> United States of America
Vice President ---> England
Bumblefuck ---> Afghanistan
Asshole ---> Iraq

My intention is to provoke and prod players to think about the USA's imperialist foreign policy, mostly on a superficial surface level, but I think it will be meaningful nonetheless. Now, with the traditional rules for P&A, the commentary I am trying to make as a designer might be left ambiguous and open to player interpretation and enaction. A player who is sympathetic to our administration's warhawk tactics might intentionally help out their Asshole (Iraq), bolstering their hands with good cards during the trading round, feigning the alleged goodwill of our coalition. As a designer, I have several new rules in mind that will force my subjectivity on players perhaps even at the cost of this being a balanced fun game.

So, in order to ensure that the games dynamics will echo the slanted relationship the two Western countries have with the two Middle Eastern countries, card distribution and trading will be augmented slightly. First, the much sought after 2 cards will icnoically signify oil in the digital games graphics. And so it follows that these cards are only distributed to Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of a round. Since the game is digital and we don't have to worry about a standard deck of playing cards, there are 6 2's: Iraq gets 4 and Afghanistan gets 2. Additionally, all the aces go to Iraq while all the Kings go to Afghanistan. The rest of the cards are distributed evenly to the rest of the players.

Play during the round goes according to traditional P&A rules. At the trading round, the United States "trades" with Iraq while England "trades" with Afghanistan. The twist here is that its not so much trading happens as much as a complete abuse of power at the discretion of the Western countries. They are free to demand whichever cards they want and however many they want. The only stipulation is that they must replace the cards they take with cards they choose from their own hand.

Here is an interface mockup sketch

Bernie and Tracy asked us to reconsider the game Asshole (also called President, natch) in a digital format.

Asshole is a social card game, with an open license for creative meta-gaming. The outcome of the cards determines a social pecking order. The card game remains the center of the action, but the social pecking order can affect probability within the game. The game often involves compulsory drink; such that players who lose are forced to imbibe more, and thereby, presumedly, will lose their concentration at a faster rate.

So, to isolate the critical elements of Asshole:

1) A core card game with unchanging rules
2) Establishing a social hierarchy
3) Used to create and enforce rules and pranks

Rules variations include autocratic powers - the people at the top can order the people at the bottom around. Aaron illustrated this to me by ordering me to do pushups after he was President, and I was asshole.

How can you create that kind of opportunity for autocracy and cruelty in a digital environment? You can see from this quick mock-up of the President's interface:

So, what happens when you cross a first person shooter Capture the Flag game and the playing cards drinking game of Asshole? You get Frag the Asshole!

So, how would a game of Frag the Asshole work? You start off with a minimum of 4 teams (with a minimum of 1 person per team). The goal of Frag the Asshole is to capture a flag from somewhere in the middle of a map (could be placed randomly, or it could be placed in a specific spot) and take it to his/her own base. When the flag is carried to that person's base, his/her team scores a point.

Frag the Asshole is a 4 round game and the team with the most points after 4 rounds is the winner. A round consists of 5 minutes in which teams try to capture the flag the most amount of times (thus scoring the most amount of points). However, between rounds there are cards that are randomly dealt by the server to each team. Each card denotes base locations and weapons. Some cards have more favorable locations for bases (closer to the flag). Some cards have more favorable weapons. It's important to note that in order for a team to obtain a base location or particular weapon (to be spawned at their base) it must get a pair of that particular card. For instance, if the team wanted a shotgun, it will need a total of 2 shotgun cards. Another thing to note is that if a team doesn't get any matches of cards, the team is randomly assigned a less favorable location and weapon(s).

Another thing to note is that the first round commences without any cards dealt. All teams have equal weapon types (all fairly low-powered) and have bases that are of equal distance from the flag. However, once a round is completed, all 4 teams are ranked based on the amount of points each one earned. If the flag was not captured, or if 2+ teams didn't capture the flag, their ranking will be determined based on the amount of frags (nice FPS term for number of kills) that team accumulated during the round.

The rankings are exactly the same as the Asshole cardgame. Team with the highest rank is the President. Second highest is Vice President. Third-highest is Bumblefuck. And last is the Asshole. In between rounds (namely, after the second and third rounds of play) the President is able to trade two cards with the Asshole and the Vice President can trade one card with the Bumblefuck.

Once all 4 rounds are completed, a final set of bonus points are awarded to teams based on their final ranking. The Asshole gets 0 additional points. The Bumblefuck gets 1 point. The Vice President gets 2 points. The President gets 3.

The winner of the game is the team who earns the most amount of points. So it behooves(sp) teams to try and either maintain a higher rank, or get out of the lower ranks.

One of the interesting possible side-effects of this multiplayer FPS and card game hybrid is cooperation and back-stabbing that could go on during the course of a 5 minute round of Capture the Flag. Lower ranked teams could gang up on higher ranked teams. Or perhaps the mid-ranked teams could try to fend off both the lowest and highest ranked team. Or maybe one of the lower teams could make it to the top by working with another team, only to screw that other team in order to keep their high ranking.

Drawing for this to come either later today (gosh it's already Thursday!) or to be shown live in class.

I was thinking about the fact that Asshole encourages abuse of your friends, and the fact that that's not something I generally enjoy. Then I realized that there was an exception - at Carleton sophomore year all my friends got into Worms Armageddon. In case you're not familiar with the game, it's a 2D game where you play as a team of worms fighting against other teams using weapons of ridiculous proportions. The saving grace of the game is that these actions are accomplished with almost no gore and with loads of bizarre humor. So. Since the sky's the limit here, I thought that I would mod Asshole as an online-Worms-chat conflagration.

Customization
The first screen you'd encounter is a character customization screen, similar to that currently used in Worms - you get to choose your name, your character's voice, your flag, your anthem, and your special weapon. Then you enter the game.

During the Round
The game is standard Asshole. While each round is going on the player sees two screens - the first is an over-the-shoulder view of her worm, her worm's cards, and the other players (View image) - the second is a chat window allowing for in-game discussion with the other players, either with the whole group or with other individual players. (View image) The player's chat window is decorated according to her current position in the game - following in the Worms style of humor, these positions are (from highest to lowest) the Great Patootie, the Sorta-High Mucky Muck, the Average Joe (repeat as many times as needed), the Wilting Wallflower, and the Lowest-of-the-Low. During the round the worms will taunt each other and comment on each other's moves (as in Worms), using the voice themes selected by the players.

Between Rounds
(Note: This section contains screenshots from Worms Armageddon - I have not edited them, they are simply for visual reference for those less familiar with the interface.)
Between each round the view on the main screen changes to a side view of the players, which is the normal view in Worms. (Example screen shot) Each status position is honored (or dishonored) by a particular placement on the map, so if any positions have changed then those players' worms move around appropriately. Then each player, in order of status, gets to attack the others. (Example action screen shot ) However, a player's attack is limited based on their status in terms of what weapons they are allowed to use. (Example weapons menu) Additionally, each player may attack any of the other players, but the players are still limited by 100 life points which are decremented by attacks from others. If, in the end, the Lowest-of-the-Low is still alive and able to kill any of the other worms, then those players switch statuses. Only the LOTL has this power, because only the most desperate element of society would stoop to such an action. Once all attacks and subsequent fallout have been completed, the final Great Patootie player sounds her national anthem, and the game shifts back into the next round of Asshole.

General Thoughts
While I have stolen a lot from Worms, I feel that that particular game is a great way to represent degrading violence in a fun and generally inoffensive manner. I believe that Asshole is best played in-person, so for an online version to work I think it would have to be augmented to incorporate activities and interaction that are not available in the real world. At least not between civilized friends. Also I think that new collaboration strategies are opened up by having a second way to jumble the power structure.

On a more general note, I find myself a little confused by this assignment, for it again seems like it might be a double assignment. We have been tasked with coming up with "A Digital Asshole Mod." Does this simply mean making a mod of Asshole that would work in a digital setting and still maintain the spirit of the game as played in person? Or does it mean making a significant modification to the game mechanics and then translating that into a digital setting? My mod definitely responds to the first - it is an online version of Asshole. You still play the card game. What has changed are the variety of actions you can employ against the other players at various times, and the manner by which you communicate (canned character comments and live chat with individuals or the whole group). But the main mechanics have not changed much at all. So I feel kind of lame about what I came up with - what I've descibed is more a hybrid of two pre-existing games than a mod. On the other hand I know that I would enjoy playing this - I described it to a friend who is familiar with both Asshole and Worms and he thought it was a really fun idea. I'm intrigued to see what everyone else comes up with, because games where you can perpetually be stuck at a disadvantage, particularly without the cushion of in-person socialization, seem like very risky business.

Considerations in moving from the real world to digital

1. The potential for increasingly large groups of people to play together
2. The typically more abstracted, less personal space of internet play
3. The highly variable speed and quality of play within the larger internet space

[Tropical life of circle]
I liked the way the pieces are placed at the begining. Since they are already close to each other and it actually increased the chance to interact with other pieces. Also deviding the path of the circle into 4 colors also made me feel that I am automatically interacting with the player who owns the terroritory by having disadvantage or advantage for the number of steps to move.

Because of all the different colors of pieces, a jungle picure with various saturated colored animals on the middle of board and also colorful dry pineapple
snacks, I became focused on color schemes when I tried to figure out the life theme of this game. I don't think this was what the designers' intended, though.
Colors are really abstract concept to think of the metapholic meaning of that and I actually tried to find my own way to put meaning on them.
Certain colors can kill each other and certain colors can share the same tile. Gray and Green colors were sort of similar(cold feeling) and also Pink and Orange(warm feeling) were similar. Similar colors kill each other and different colors live together.It felt like similar colored pieces are trying to kill each other to make itself unique in the jungle. Also different colors are attracted to each other just like human beings are usually attracted(hence favorable) to somebody who's different to oneself.

[Cops and Robbers]
I think donuts were really nice idea for this game. I was actually busy eating it and it actually made me a little bit distracted and lazy just like the preposition written on the game manual. It felt like the game rules were changed to be advantageous for robbers. Cops need to catch all of robbers although just one of the robbers need to escape to win the game. It became more disadvantageous for the Cop team when I was playing this game because cops had to wait for the grace roll for a long time to start chasing. I felt like that this game says that keeping justice is always harder than commiting crime by the game mechanics itself. Then also I was wondering if it is really justice for cops to be lazy to catch robbers because of donuts. This actually reminded me of comedy films about two buddy cops who happened to catch criminals without enough effort in humorous way. I wanted to see more interactions happening between cops and robbers encouraged by the game mechanics, though.


[Coattail]
I think I enjoyed playing this game the most. There happened lots of interactions between players (taking and being taken moments), game pace was speedy and 3 different choices of movement(rolling the dice as many number of times as equal to the number of pieces of the track or starting new piece or changing track) actually brought interesting strategies. Staying in a track with other players' pieces seemed to be more advantageous first time but it became so often chances to be caught by other players' piece. Especially on the most inner track, there are always chances of the new piece's spawining and it becomes too risky to stay on. My best strategy is changing the track and trying to bring more piece of mine to the track to have extra dice-role. The outter a track is the more the number of tiles but it seemed to be less disadvantageous than having more chance to be caught by others. Then losing a turn to change track nicely balances that. This game makes me think about interesting strategies. But I had hard time to find life theme out of that. It would be nice to put specific characters to the pieces or some visual change of the board/piece will be helpful for players to come up with ideas of life theme.

Cops & Robbers
This game suffered heavily from a lack of clarity in the instructions and board design. We had such a difficult time playing it that I don't really have a clear enough idea of the intended game mechanics to comment on them. I think it would have benefitted greatly from just a short playthrough from the designers to see what kind of critical information was missing from the instructions. It wasn't clear where pieces went for the beginning setup or where they started moving. The derelict and up-scale neighborhoods weren't labelled. Also the two sets of robbers and cops were identical so when my cop pieces caught up with Herbs, it became difficult to know whose pieces were whose.

The fiction of the game played into a cartoon-ish stereotype we've all seen before... cops like donuts! I think this might've worked better if the robbers were equally bungling and lazy... it'd be a more even match between the equally lazy and stupid cops and robbers. But setting up barricades and setting fires didn't really provide the depth I would've liked to see coming out of the games chosen fiction.

Coattails
Coattails started slowly for us. It wasn't immediately clear to us how the "different lanes" mechanic worked and switching lanes was even less clear. But soon it came into focus for us and it was a really interesting game. Our group got really into announcing (declaring) which piece we'd be moving on that turn. I'm not sure why, but I got really into this aspect of the game which arose out of a whimsical interpretation of one line of the instructions. But we all declared things really loudly, laughed a lot, probably resulting in less oxygen going to the brain which then resulted in a more fun time being had. I would've liked to play this game a bit longer to see how it would have progressed closer to the end.

As for the fiction, it wasn't really clear if there actually was any. There was the implied metaphor of "riding on someone's coattails", but the games mechanic only vaguely aligned with that. It didn't effect my enjoyment of the game, but I can imagine a more substantial elaboration of this fiction making the game a deeper experience.

Pachisi of Verona
This game had a great fiction for its foundation... a Shakespearean parchisi mod... its a novel idea. However, some of the mechanics seemed a little weird. Eloping with someone was difficult because it was unclear how beneficial it would be and it was difficult to get the opportunity. It was made even more difficult by the rule forcing you to declare which piece you intended to move before rolling the dice. We decided to abandon the declaration rule, but still no one eloped. I think it would have been interesting to pursue more rules based on the Romeo & Juliet story. How about fights breaking out between the feuding families? Anyway, we had a fun time speculating outloud about who was going to elope with who. There was definitely a spark of something in that.

First off: sorry Team Brad-Rick-Doox for not getting to play your game. It sounded like a neat concept from what I was able to hear during your meetings.

Tropical Circle of Life

I played this game twice. I enjoyed this game. Also, I really found myself struggling with this game. I think it was the math.

The game itself was pretty sound. Unlike some other comments, I had no problem with the abstract nature of the piece because our own sides of the board were pretty clear, I thought. The theme of the game was very appealing; I was reminded of various experiments and theories in evolutionary behavior, especially computer programs by Axelrod.

One thing that felt weird was the fact that all the pieces were already out in playable position. With Pachisi, getting another piece out of the center was an enjoyable event, a sort of “A HA!” moment. With this, I really didn’t get that sense; one could say it was all downhill from the start, since you could never play more than the four pieces you start out with.

And then there’s the math. It was a bit frustrating that I had to go through every piece I had on the board to figure out what was the best move I could make.

I think the fact that there was this sort of equality between the players from the start and lasting for a significant time through the game kept the game from being as close as it could be to its Prey/Circle-of-life theme. Or that could be my own personal prejudices, where tropical jungle life is cold, ruthless and unforgiving. Still, a fun game.

Cops and Robbers

I think I should admit off the bat: this game annoyed me with the first die roll. It was thematically spot on.

I just couldn’t stand the theme. The thought of an inept and unwilling police force angered me; seeing it happen on a board where I could do little else but roll and watch as they puttered around, doomed to failure at the hands of more mobile thieves.

At least in our game where nothing went right for our donut eating cops, happily munching away while the lucky double-rolling throngs of robbers were off doing the things that robbers do best.

The board and instructions were pretty shaky. It was really hard to get a feel for the ordering of things. If there was an example of a turn progression in the instructions, that would have been really helpful.

Coattails (Quick thought on our own game)

I talked a bit about how this game came about with much consternation, very aware of what it meant in terms of treatment of life theme. If I had any sort of drawing ability, I would have drawn this whimsical title graphic showing various tuxedoed folks running on top of everyone’s coattails in a line. People stepping on people’s heads, falling down, jumping over people, sprawling on the floor, jumping off to the side… It was a fantastic image and we rolled with that… much to the detriment of this concept of larger life theme. In my mind that was a worthy sacrifice, but…

Coattails:

It was an interesting game in which people were to one-up each other by passing them by to win. The big problem I had with it was the title. I think the gameplay didn't really reflect riding other people's coattails. It felt more like I was using other people to get ahead. The more people there were to use, the further ahead I could make it. Riding coattails means I stay behind someone and ride on their success (but not surpass that person). I'm not sure of what other title could've been used. Maybe Cruise and Abuse?

the food chain game (sorry, I forgot the title):

This was a game that highlights what it is like to hunt and be hunted. The idea was to capture your prey (the person sitting to the right of me) and avoid being captured by my predator (the person sitting to the left of me). I really liked the premise of the game and the game itself actually played real well. I think the only problem I had with it was that in real life, the being at the top of the food chain can't be eaten by the person at the bottom of the food chain. That is, the food chain isn't a circular construct. It's linear going from weakest to strongest (with humans on top). However, it's all but impossible to express this in a game without keeping it balanced for all players. So given that, it's a great concept and made for an enjoyable experience.

the Verona game (I also forgot this title too :/):

The only difference between this game and normal Pachisi is that players can elope with each other. However it was extremely difficult to get the eloping mechanic to actually happen. It required that only certain players could elope with other players and it only lasted up until a specific space was reached, which would break the couple apart. I think this mechanic could've been worked on more so that the core change to Pachisi could be seen and played with more often. I also think some other alterations to the game could have been made which would have furthered the game's life theme. As it was, the game felt like Pachisi with just one added sub-set of rules.

Here is the rules to Cops and Robbers (the game Yuechuan and I put together). Please note that when I typed this up, I accidentally forgot to mention the Safe Houses and what they were used for on the board. They were like the safety spots in Pachisi. Cops couldn't capture Robbers on these particular spots.

SO... the assignment is to modify Parcheesi and implement a narrative/life theme expression. Very well. Here are my short notes on the experience of playing the results:

Pachisi of Verona
I ended up enjoying this game. I say "ended" as the game had somewhat of a steep learning curve - the instructions were dense and tricky, and the game mechanic did not quickly reveal itself. However, as I gathered from the opposite experience playing the next game, a well-detailed rule set is vital for informed game play. Any question that may come up during gameplay better be answered somewhere in those rules, or else naught but confusion is bound to prevail amongst your players.

The headline on this one caught me as well, pointing immediately to the sensibilities of a certain unnamed classmate: "Love is sometimes a beneficial, and sometimes a hindrance." This pragmatic standpoint became one of the cornerstones of gameplay - however, love in this game is generally not beneficial, as it only detracts from the potential for victory in the game world. I did like the way that "love" was portrayed by pieces forming pairs and getting rolls for themselves, however the game did not stray far enough from the original Pachisi mechanic to really involve me in a meaningful experience. There was one good "older brother chases off little sister's ratty boyfriend" moment, which was nice, as I had never previously found a younger sister to provide me with such an experience.

Kopz n' Robberz
This game was a case in which an ambiguous ruleset - and a hyperactive play partner - led to a bout of chaotic gameplay. It was unclear where the starting points were, what some of the pieces did, which colors mapped to what areas, etc - not to mention that the game pieces were bigger than the squares to hold them on the board! We sort of threw ourselves into it headfirst and then tried to figure it out as we played, sort of the opposite approach of how we tackled the previous game. The experience ended up being very free form and fast moving - maybe reflective of how running from the cops must be? I didn't really see that much of a connection to a strong life message: cops like donuts and capture robbers, robbers run from cops and set fires - what does this say about existence? One final note is that speeding up Pachisi by rolling two dice instead of one makes the game exponentially more fun. Donuts help too.

TAKEAWAYS:
1. A majorly explicit rulebook is vital. As a designer, I almost had to clamp my hand over my mouth when I watched people start playing my group's game by going the opposite way down the board. Then I looked over the rules, and saw that it was written "clockwise", not counter... Explicitness is key, but also clarity and pith - maybe we can devote a small section of some class time to go over this art?? It is duly noted that pictures can and will help.

2. The chicken and egg question of mechanics and theme - which comes first? Our game was accused of being too abstract in the way it tied the message to the gameplay. Admittedly, I had spent a long time thinking about how to tie the mechanic to the theme - my english major brain can form connections between ANYTHING, given enough time and a relevant assignment. By the time others started playing the game, the game's narrative was so firm in my head that it was incomrehensible how anyone wouldn't see it once they started playing. However, this viewpoint was soon shifted...

3. Production values - make it good, and make it quick! Who are you demoing this for? How much time should you spend on a prototype that could change tomorrow? I don't know if this debate has been cleared up at all, but it is still a good question to keep in mind - make the game pretty, and the experience of experiencing it is deepened. Never underestimate the importance of pretty colors.

First of all, I want to say that this was the first game design assignment we've all had together where we weren't allowed to explain anything to the players, and I at least did not understand the full weight of that in terms of production value. I'm not saying that as an excuse, because obviously this was an important learning experience in terms of presenting your game in absentia. But I do think it was unfortunate because all of us came up with really neat ways to twist the rules and experience of Pachisi, and that was what I really wanted to get out of the demonstration more than learning how to write rules and design boards and pieces. Also, I was unclear as to what standard we were being held to in terms of production design. My team (Circle-of-Life/Prey) is getting criticism for having pieces that were too abstract, that hindered the metaphor we were trying to adopt. I'm not saying that the criticism is unjustified at all, but personally I had never understood that there was any metaphor to Pachisi, and since we were basing our mod on that game (which has very abstract pieces - after all, why are you enemies with everyone else? who is your game character?) I don't think it should be a surprise that some of our class's projects erred on the abstract side. I guess my suggestion would be that in the future this assignment not have two lessons - maybe have an in-class assignment on designing rules and pieces, and then follow it up with the larger mod assignment. I think that combining the two caused unneccesary strife and the loss of understanding some neat mechanics.

1) Cops & Robbers
This game was based on a great metaphor, and introduced some new ways for players to interact with each other (e.g. the robbers set fires, the police set blockades). Unfortunately, a lot of things were unclear on the board and the instructions for setup were incomplete. For example, you couldn't tell the difference between your and your partner's pieces on your team (i.e. all the robbers look the same). But perhaps this was a mechanic that I missed - on your turn could you move any piece on your team? It was also unclear as to which neighborhoods were the good ones versus the bad ones. Another question was what was the incentive to start fires or lay blockades? It just seemed like a huge hassle (production note: particularly without counters to keep track of how long they had been in place) so my test group just avoided it. As a game experience note, the policemen get the satisfaction of catching a robber, but the robbers get no similar satisfaction - I don't think it's the same feeling to say "Ha! You didn't catch me this time" as to say "Ha! I caught you and now you're out of the game!" As a robber, I really wanted to rob the houses that I landed on - then chance would have helped me to gain something, rather than simply evade things. Overall, I think this game had some really good ideas and interesting player interaction that were hindered by a few basic logistical questions - I would like to know what sort of gameplay and strategic situations the designers imagined and intended.

2) Coattails
This game took a while for me to understand - or at least come to my own understanding of it. But when I did, I really liked it. All my remaining uncertainty comes from the rules on movement of pieces, which I would love to have explained in person because they may have been written clearly but in a descriptive style that doesn't click with my brain. Anyway, once the interactions between the placement of pieces started to emerge, I thought that it turned into a fantastic strategy game. I'm not sure if I quite got the metaphor, because you really only rode coattails for one turn before you overran everyone and pulled the rug out from underyourself so to speak. But I really enjoyed the experience of playing this game.

3) Pachisi of Verona
This game had a really cute concept and a metaphor I could understand. The rules seemed clear, though it turned out later that we probably misunderstood the rules of how to read the dice, which in turn probably led to some of the difficulties we encountered. But I'll stick to my thoughts at the time. The fact that you had to declare which piece you were going to move didn't seem to make much of a difference - my test group ended up discarding that rule. It took too long for any player's pieces to get within range of another's - this was probably due to the dice issue. The biggest question I ended up with about the mod was how probable or even desireable were the new mechanics? In other words, how probable was it that you would land on someone's space and couple with them, how probable was it that you would have a sibling in the right area to break it up, and how probable was it that the couple and the sibling would ever meet up? Wouldn't all couples just get set back to the beginning? There didn't seem to be any real incentive to elope, and most players who got in range of each other avoided it. Which I guess is where declaring becomes important, but otherwise it seemed extraneous. But again, if we had known how to read the dice perhaps we would have ended up completely mixed with each other and declaring would have usually been necessary.

For Bernie's class last week, we made our own mods of Pachisi and playtested the mods created by other groups. My thoughts...

Cops & Robbers

A classic chase theme that fits with the simple mechanics of Pachisi. However, our playtest group had a difficult time with this game because the board was not clearly marked, which made it difficult to determine the objectives, which in turn made it difficult to determine what strategy, if any, could be used. On first glance, it seems as if the game was stacked against the cops given that the robbers only need to have one piece escape in order to win. However, due to chance in our particular game, all the cops got out early while most of the robbers remained stuck at their starting point because of unlucky dice rolls, and the game balance quickly tipped in the other direction, becoming nearly impossible for the robbers to win. Additionally, the incentive for creating blockades or starting fires never seemed to present itself. The game would have benefited greatly from some preliminary playtesting.

On another note, I noticed that players for the first game of Cops & Robber filled up early because of the donut snack, and ensuing players were eager to play for the same reason. Goes to show what marketing and tie-ins can do.

Coattails

The action of getting ahead at the expense of your opponents quickly generated a lot of competitive spirit. However, without a mechanism for players to defend against this (other than your opponents getting crappy die rolls), our game degenerated into a cycle of players continually being sent back to the center, never really able to make much progress on the board.

The mechanics of this game seem to lend itself better to a "Backstabbing" rather than a "Coattails-Riding" theme (i.e., "you can get ahead by harming your opponents, but what comes around goes around"). Perhaps a better general mechanic that would fit in with this theme would be that, rather than allowing you to bowl through opponents before you, each die roll (and subsequently steps advanced) you make also advances everyone in your lane that's behind you.

Pachisi of Verona

The fiction for this game was quite creative and thought-provoking. On first glance, the idea of coupling pieces seemed quite cute and whimsical, but on further inspection, it became apparent that the theme was cynical, and even mildly disturbing when projected on certain game scenarios. Granted that pieces "in love" advance around the board faster than other pieces but here in this game world, once they are coupled, they are uncontrollable and all player strategy goes out the window (which in my mind, is a bad thing, especially when the only action available to the player to combat this loss of control is also predicated on a slim chance), and if they "elope" there is absolutely no benefit to the player, essentially disappearing from the game world.

In my game, I was doing everything I could to prevent my pieces from "falling in love" and running off like idiot children into the vortex of nothingness that awaited them (if another relative didn't intercept them and knock some sense into their heads in time). The only strategy I could think of that would take advantage of this couples mechanic was to send a piece far ahead, then have a lagging piece "fall in love," and hope that the advance piece could catch the couple as they raced by to their doom. So during the game, I did my best to avoid the dogged marriage attempts of the preceding player (Mihai, you bastard), while frantically racing one piece ahead. When I finally decided that the advance piece was far enough ahead to be in place to blockade the running couple, of course that's when he lands on another piece and has the misfortune of "falling in love" himself (I could imagine my piece screaming, "I am fortune's fool!" as, after all his efforts to save his siblings, he reluctantly begins his own race into oblivion). Ah, the foibles of love.

Admittedly, when we were assigned to modify Pachisi, I thought it wouldn't be too difficult to improve on what I considered to be a rather dull, chance-based game. I've known for quite some time that I'm drawn to games which allow for a large degree of player choice, and which exhibit a particular mathematical elegance. Pachisi, to me, seemed more about random chance than anything else. Admittedly, the opportunity to form a strategy from the chance did arise occassionally, so maybe I was too hard on the game....

At any rate, retrofitting the game proved more challenging than I had expected. Game experiences are obviously multidimensional, and at least from my experience, narrative theme and mathematical elegence just don't seem to go hand in hand...

Cops and Robbers:
I think this was a really good example of a strong narrative theme without a good hold on mechanic. The idea of cops chasing robbers is classic, powerful, and lends itself well to the idea of Pachisi, wherin players "chase" each other's pieces around the board. However, the entirely chance-based nature of Pachisi undermined the attempted narrative, at least in my attempt to play this game. Basically, the robbers completed destroyed the cops because they rolled grace rolls too early. Only a single robber needs to escape, so the odds of all the cops actuall managing to land on the robbers seems very slim. In the version we played, all of the robbers managed to escape, without even using the additional fire mechanic. Honestly, I think this game would have turned out much better if we had time to play several versions of it, hoping that the chance factor would balance out.

Coattails:
Now here was a game that appealed to my sense of mathematical elegance and choice. This game was immediately engaging to me because it was a lot more dynamic than primary Pachisi. The ability to choose to switch lanes immediately gave me a way of escaping the fickle finger of fate and of messing with my opponents, since changing lanes directly affected the outcome of their dice rolls. Strategies also started showing up early, such as waiting in front of someone's start gate, then running them over after taking advantage of the bonus for them being there. Mathematically, however, I would have had the players start on the outside track, because the bonus of having all the players start there would have been offset by having to take a longer path. As it stood, this game was primary about everyone trying to rush their way around the faster inner track, so it still largely fell down to chance until someone had the guts to move into a full slower track.

Despite the great play mechanic, however, I didn't really feel like the game lived up to it's narrative premise. I agree with Tracy and the rest of the classes comments last Thursday, where they stated that the act of blowing past someone was exhilirating because you bowled them over and sent them back to start. This was like a reward for ceasing to ride on someone's Coattails. I would have named the game "Fast Track", or "Rush Hour", honestly, since with everyone crowding around the inner track it felt more like a racecar race than like the original premise.

Life Tropical:
Unfortunately, I didn't really have an opportunity to play this game, but I'd at least like to say that I thought it had a good premise with the idea of ecosystems and predators and prey. Predators and Prey lend themselves to chases around an environment - but I wonder if the delicate balance of a living ecosystem is adequately represented by the chance-oriented nature of Pachisi? I noticed that the movement restriction and bonus could act as a sort of dampening factor on the chance element, so I wonder how this game would have played out.

Pachisi of Verona:
So, since this was the game I presented, I probably don't need to comment on it directly, but I felt that this would be a good place to give a few designer's diary-esque notes.

It's interesting how the actual act of designing this game illustrated a major difference of life perspective between the members of our group. Doox had the (rather brilliant, if I may compliment him here) idea of subverting the competitive, warlike idea of the original Pachisi into a game where couples search for love. In fact, the blockade (which I recall giving him nightmares with the first time we played) was turned into a symbol of happiness. The Castles would be "love hotels" where people could roll the dice to see if the pair fell in love and could become a couple, or maybe if they'd break up.

I, of course, am kind of a contrarian, and can tend to be pretty cynical, so I tried subverting his subversion, and the main concept for Pachisi of Verona was born. Imagine a game of Romeo and Juliet where you play as Lord Montague and Lord Capulet. You'd be feuding with the other player, and would probably find it quite frustrating if your children fell in love with each other! At first, I brought up the idea as kind of a joke, but the more time I spent thinking it through, the more it felt to me like the game mapped pretty well to the chance based nature of Pachisi. I personally believe that love is a very chance based thing, but even if I'm wrong to think so, I imagine it must seem somewhat that way to a disapproving parent. The rather cynical nature of the premise also lent itself well to being a unique narrative, and it could be implemented with minimal changes to the original rules of Pachisi. If you were losing to your opponent, you might want your loser children to pair up with his winners, so that you could move your pieces faster, kind of like marrying upwards in social class. Mathematically, for a couple to reach the center of the board, one of the two tokens would not have made a full lap. In this case, either we could count it as a win for the opponent's piece, who made it into the center without completing a full lap (kind of like marrying upwards for money), or that piece could be stolen from that player for a bonus point. (Kind of like getting a great person to marry downward in social class)

We ended up going back and forth for quite some time on the topic, with Doox actually rather appalled at the idea of such a cynical game. Finally, we reached sort of a compromise wherin the couples would try to run away, much to the annoyance of both famlies. This also completed the narrative cycle of Romeo and Juliet. Unfortunately, it felt like it became too complicated to have the couples run away, and the mechanics kind of showed this, as Yuechuan pointed out. This might have been a little better on a computer, where the computer would have moved for the couples, instead. This way people wouldn't have to worry about managing them, since it was rather confusing.

While we were about to play "Verona", I felt the Premise was pretty compelling and the intention to map a love story of Shakespear's time to a Pachisi Geography is so welcome. But the play experience itself was not as amazing as expected. The rule is well changed and I like the "couple" thing, the conflict is not so strong though. When people are roll one more turn for the couple running, the subject of the story becomes vague. The problem then might turn out that each side less intends to get into necessary confrontation, which is badly required to have the X happen. There must be a way to adjust the board layout to fit for the narrative, or simply give up some inessential story element, to make the mechanics strong enough and the play work alive.

"Tropical Circle" is doing good in metaphor, having the players be both prey and predator is just an exellent mechanic. However, the color pieces just negativiate a clear narrative, especially with the consideration of the nicely put such that high contrast tropical forest pic at the center. Consequently, the niche for each piece is left just an abstract, meanlingless geometric square. I think that's why the story/narration feels incomplete.

"Coattails" has a very nice mechanics of changing tracks. The dice-rolling and new rules work well. But the metaphor seems not strong enough. So, we almost lost interest to do the changing track and having a bit fun beating the opponents' pawns back to zero. I estimate this design would be better if the story part could be more developed.

When we were designing the R&P version, we spent long time discussing the mapping problem. We reached finally to have the mechanic symmatric for both side so that the player won't be mathematically bothering if s/he is playing inferior chance. We called it "fair". As we decided to add the "blockade" into, we added "Fire", and "Donut" fun to "Boarder" escape.

Overall, I think the harmony of the game really weighs much on how the story and the mechanics could balance for each other, and as for the board game design, the balance of geometry/topology mechanics and elements of the real life relations. The only goal is the adjust each for be perfectly working with its counterpart - life story for geometry and vice vasus. What's more, for the player, they see pawns and graphics and a board with narrative potentials, while the math hides underneath - isn't it important to balance more for the visual clue!

I want to introduce a traditional Korean game called "Yut Nori(Yut Game)". This game has similar concepts with pachisi but also has other interesting mechanics. Korean historians say this game is similar to a chinese game or a mongolian game but the actual origin is not certain."Yut" is a wooden bar which has a round face and a flat face so it can only be fliped(showing flat face) over or landed right(showing round face). This game uses 4 of "Yut". Also the status of having all 4 "Yut" fliped over is also called "Yut". Koreans usually play this game with their family on festives. There are 2 different style of Yut game board.

For those who want to have quick review,

[Major differences in game mechanics]

- Players can choose shortcut to return to the base when their piece is landed on intersection points(Blue points).
- When players meet their own piece they can move together.
( When players meet opponent's piece they send it back to the base. )
- One of the 4 Yuts has a special mark on its flat face. If 3 Yuts are showing round side on and 1 Yut with the mark is fliped over then players should move their piece 1 step backward.

For those who want more detailed explanation,


[How to play] (This writing is from a Korean Info search site.)

Yut game is our traditional game that we play with yut Ball after dividing in teams with same number of persons. We usually play it with two teams, but we can make three or four teams in case of need.

The place of playing yut is a yard or a wide vacant land of town in
case of many participants, and in case of home, it is a relatively wide space like a main room or a living room. How to divide teams for playing yut is a general rule that a participant throws a stick of yut, Ball has a flat side and a round(convex)side, and a racer(a kind of tiles) of yut is moved according to its side.

1. Term of yut

Do : After throwing yut Ball, one of them is turnde upside down. A racer can move one space.
Gae : After throwing yut Ball, two of them are turnde upside down. A racer can move two space.
Gul : After throwing yut Ball, three of them are turned upside down. A racer can move three spaces.
Yut : After throwing yut Ball, all for of them are turnde upside down. A racer can move four spaces.
Mo : After throwing Yut Ball, all for of them are fallen down. A racer can move five spaces.

*In case of showing Yut or Mo. You can throw yut sticks one more time *
Hootae(Back) do : When one of them is turnde upside down and then it has a special mark(-2) after throwing yut sticks, this is called 'Back do' or 'Hootae do'. At this time, a racer must go back to a space. This 'Back do' is a kind of reformed yut game. (The way of moving 'Back do' is that a moving racer on the yut board must be moved, and if there is mo moving racer on it, a racer is moved from the start to the finish and then, if you throw yut sticks again and they shows 'Back do' , a racer(any racer of same team) can be escaped.

Yut sticks : a piece of yut
Racers of yut(a kind of tiles) : Small things to move on checks on a yut board.
Check on a yut board : Checks of racers on the yut board.
Yut board : A board used in playing yut, or a playing yut
Dot : A place of a racer's staying on the yut board, of when scores is made.
Fallen down : The round side of yut stick is showed
Turnde upside down : The flat side of yut stick is showed.

2. THE METHOD AND RULE OF PLAYING YUT

1) A team making a round first on the board is a winner, and four racers usually go round ahead. (A team making four scores first is winner)
2) If a racer is already on the place arrived when another racer is moving, In case of a racer of the same team, it can be moved carrying jon the back. have to throw yut sticks once more.(Don't change the order.) In case of a racer of the other team, you must catch it first, and then you have to throw yut sticks once more.(Don't change the order.)
3) If you throws 'Do', 'Gae' or 'Gul' can be moved first.(But, if you throw 'Yut' of 'Mo' after catching a racer of the other team.)
4) If you throw 'Yut' or 'Mo' and then, you catch a racer of the other team, you may throw yut sticks just one more time. (Only 'Yut' or 'Mo' is applied to)

3. THE WAY OF MOVING A RACER

1) If a racer goes round from the start to the finish, it makes a score. (Unit : Juim)
2) If a racer stays on an angle of The yut board. It can move to the center of it.(It can change its direction)
3) If a racer stays on the right angle and then, it moves toward the center. It must stay in the center, so that it can change its direction Toward the finish.
4) A catched racer begins to move from the start when its turn comes
5) A racer can move carrying its racers of same team on the back without regard to the number of racers.
6) A team that all of four racers make a round is a winner. Winner has to win two times first.)
7) Number of playing yut is determined by plying team. (Usually, a Winner has to win two times first.)
8) Except 'Back do', racers must not go back.

Coattails

I had a lot of fun with this one. The act of sticking pins into the board was inherently satisfying (similar to popping bubblewrap), and added to my overall enjoyment, particularly the act of taking opponent’s pins and stabbing them back in the center. Sticking a pin has a degree of aggressiveness to it, which I read as a metaphor of ‘stabbing another in the back’.

I definitely liked how the game moved much faster, and how the theme of blocking was basically inverted by allowing you to leap frog. I think at times it was too fast leading to people going back to the center repeatedly.

Cops and Robbers

I think the theme was interesting here, but the rules took me a long time to decipher. The board and pieces could have been helped by clearer markings. I never figured out a reason to start a fire. Our game never got up much steam.

PREY (aka Tropical Circle of Life)

This was pretty fun. I liked the metaphor, and modifiers used to create separate ecosystems. I think if each piece had an animal associated with it, then it would have made the modifiers much more meaningful, and hopefully in turn create more meaningful play.

The constant calculation along with having to tilt one’s head to read the modifiers was difficult to get used to and could benefit from some design improvements.

Jess + Herb + Noah + Mihai's rules document for the game of Prey.

In today's FunLog you'll find an entry called "Of Geese, Wolves, Games and Culture." It has some bearing on what we did last session and what we'll be doing for the rest of the class.

There's also a piece I wrote a while ago, called "The Theater of Games," which you might also find relevant, and maybe even entertaining.

I remember playing Parcheesi with my father and other family members even as a child. Then I remember playing Sorry, which seemed like a modified Parcheesi (notably offering the chance to insincerely smear "SOOOORRRRYYYYY" over someone as you screwed them with a card). Modified Parcheesi because it was about moving around the board by dice rolls, reaching for home with all your little colored pieces.

Now there's been a class assignment to modify Parcheesi, thematically. As much as I can remember Sorry! didn't really have a theme, other than, "Screw you." The in-class games were reaching for life cycle reproduction.

Life Tropical

Life Tropical attempts to model ecosystems in a board game. Players have relationships to other players of predator, prey or ally, and they have relationships to areas on the board in terms of natural habitat, or hindering habitat.

This was a rich idea, but the interface was overly complexified by the abstraction - since players were represented by colors, they had to remember relationships to other colors. It wasn't like "I'm a lion, he's a snake" and making some association, it was like, I'm pink, he's orange. What does that mean, thematically?

With a mapping onto actual animals, I believe the terrain idea could have come alive (har har). This game featured some great gameplay potential but needed just a bit more fictional meat on the rule-bones.

Parcheesi of Verona

Love is a hinderance, doncha know?

This game added some chaos, and thereby strategy, since opposing player pieces could coincidentally mate and leave the board. It was love gone awry, and it was hard to see how any kind of relationship would help you keep your family chugging towards final judgement and scorekeeping. Incest was not allowed, it appears, within these rules.

And these rules of this game were a comparatively long read, and while they were among the most thorough (and thereby helpful, in some sense) they were also somewhat disturbing. The politics of love were spelled out in some detail, as I recall, and I was left wondering how I was to play out my part in the judgement of emotions.

Judging from Parcheesi of Verona, love is based primarily on timing and location. Reduced to unstoppable adolescent eloping, love here lacks any sense of choice. But actually, that's okay because the lack of choice or permission follows the fiction well (disobedient children and all). And as I played this through, I could start to anticipate the relationships and make them bend to my will. Manipulating young hearts, as it were! Heartless.

Cops & Robbers

Of the games I played, the Cops and Robbers variant of Parcheesi best tied their snack to their gameplay. As I set my Cop pieces on the board, at their starting place in the donut shop, I had to sweep away crumbs of my chocolate-honey-dipped sugar confection from the gameboard.

Two opposing sides, each with complimentary abilities to block the progress of the other. Besides the game pieces, there were even orange pac-man shapes drawn on scotch-taped paper! I thought these might be fires, but they could have been barricades. This game suffered from poorly scripted rules; while the basics of gameplay were covered, we were left imagining which areas of the gameboard corresponded to which rules, what constituted a police barricade, etc.

There might have been some hint of the eternal struggle, between order and chaos, between law and anarchy, between authority and subversion. But that didn't come through the game - it was more simply articulated; fun and straightforward if haltingly structured. Life cycle? Have a donut!

Conclusion

There's some difficult tension between mechanics and life cycle themes. Which to start with? The theme or the architecture? This sounds like a Marc LeBlanc opener for a Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics debate.

I'm reminded of Hasbro's Game of Life - a more linear drive through explicit American life themes. I have a 1960s edition endorsed by Art Linkletter; I bought it at the Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale because I had such fond memories of playing it at my friend's summer house in Michigan. But the game is so deterministic, and so focused around the accrual of monies that it's swiftly depressing.

Bernie spoke of Isolation which seems more likable if less life-oriented. Of course, life is so encompassing, and time our only definitive, non-renewable resource, you can make so many metaphors with pieces moving by chance.

Jess has posted a thought-provoking meditation on the "Flood Game Issue." Her thoughts and those of the people who've chosen to comment on them, are profound and provocative.

I think she is correct in saying that this discussion is too sensitive and complex to attempt to resolve in class, on the other hand, I find it highly relevant to any designer who looks at games as an expressive medium.

So the question came up in class last night as to whether it was appropriate to design a game based on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, since this had been an example given by Bernie of a possible life lesson around which to mod Pachisi.

My answer is not now, not for a long time.

Certainly games can deal with serious subjects, and certainly there are games that deal with traumatic events. However, I believe that it is only after a respectful mourning and acceptance period following such an event that such a game is appropriate. It is certainly not appropriate while the event is still going on, when effort should be spent on helping those who are there rather than imagining "what would I do if I were there?" Because we're not there, and it is disrespectful to pretend we are.

How long a wait is long enough? When does something stop being a recent event and become history? How many people have to have come to grips with a tragedy before it is appropriate to subject it to cold objectivity? I don't know.

I remember four years ago. I remember being angrier on that day than almost any other point in my life. I am not from New York, and my relatives in New York and Washington were well out of harm's way. But I was so shaken by the events of that day, by the fact that I called my father for reassurance only to find that I had more information than he did, by the pure fury I had when I overheard two students on that very afternoon talking dispassionately about how "we should have seen this coming", etc. I wanted to scream at them, to ask them how dare they say such things when we didn't even know how many people had been killed. This summer I saw a preview for a National Geographic Channel documentary on 9/11, and it made me cry. And yet I think we are getting far enough from that event to be able to talk about it objectively, to investigate it in various media forms including games. As long as the proper respect is taken. But I don't see how there can be any respect in making a game about a human disaster that is still taking place.

This debate is so personal that I think it is good that we didn't try to have it in class.

Several times during our exploration of Pachisi, Tracy mentioned Backgammon. FY basic I, here is a great collection of backgammon variants.

Now, don't go crazy with this. Just use it as a kind of loosening-up exercise as you go about exploring your own Pachisi-like game. Since we're looking for a "themed" version, you might take a quick glance at another game in the Pachisi family - the Egyptian game of Senet. Note how aspects of a life-theme are introduced with squares that stand for "happiness," "truth" and "rebirth." This is the direction that you should be going in your Pachisi interpretation.

The main imagery of the game clearly has a lot to do with chance. So, whatever theme you select, it will need to reflect some of the classic issues of fate, randomness, forces beyond our capacity for control. What's been happening to the people in New Orleans, for example. Then there's the question of strategy and what potency logic really has in the situation you're exploring. In Pachisi, you found yourself bored when you couldn't exercise more logic. But, referring again to New Orleans, what role does strategy play for most of the people involved in the experience. The "citizens" are clearly the main pieces in the game and there are some limited strategies that they can exercise - like help each other. The "authorities" are more like random factors, sadly. When and where they appear might be determined by drawing from a set of cards, or a special throw.

Give yourself time to make something that you feel depicts some significant relationship between players and the universe that is meaningful to you personally. Give yourself more time to make sure that it: 1) provides players with an honest reflection of those dynamics, and 2) is fun! (as in: engaging, involving, exciting, time-warping)

Then figure out what snack would be most condusive to playful engagement.

You'll also need to make a simple sheet of rules so others can play.

We'll start at 6:40

1. Listening to, watching, or playing a good story.
2. Air conditioning.
3. Speaking with people on IRC.
4. Questioning everything.
5. Conceptualizing game concepts and products. (especially when I'm showering)
6. Riding my bike to class.
7. Taking off my shoes.
8. Picking other people's brains (figuratively).
9. Getting my hair cut after letting it go for too long.
10. Going through the iPod in my head. (especially in the shower)

While thinking about my fun things, I realized that it gets more and more personal. I felt like writing diary. Then, the more I tried to think why it's fun for me, the less it got fun. I became homesick for a while, I suddenly missed so many stuffs I like that I don't have right now. Then, I asked myself what about new fun stuffs that I haven't experienced yet. Am I not trying enough to find new things? Am I feeling guilty when I try to find fun stuff rather than prepare for my career? Should I try to find fun in something related to my career? What's still fun which has no meaning or value but just fun? When so many questions come up in my mind, it gets less fun. So I just tried to find the happy moments I had in my memory and write them here.

I like to go to a book store to see various kinds of books, play the keyboard using different sound patches, draw using tablet, walk through the path surrounded by lots of trees, fold T-shirts smelling the freshness after laundry, watch birds' funny way of walking, sing walking, cook La-myun(noodle) experimentally, record and watch video files of me & my friends all happily chatting after drinking some alcohol, eat Korean street food standing and chatting with friends, watch classic music performance with my mother, talk about the strangest and weirdest ideas about making a game with friends, see my program working perfectly or find errors immediately, watch Korean soap opra, play a game that makes me feel that I'm really exploring inside the game world, sing R&B on the stage, shower with hot water, sing or playing "my favorite things" and so many other things...

This class really makes me think about myself because I'm the first subject when it comes to studying what makes people fun. In terms of that, this class feels like getting me more and more deep into philosophical matters of life.

I have a book called "14,000 things to be happy about." by Barbara Ann Kipfer. I certainly respect her talent to come up with so many things to make herself happy and write them one by one. I wonder if I could find that many things that make me fun or happy.

Not so complicated for me, FUN is sitting down by a tea case at the clearance among some 1,800-year old acient buildings



which date back to 3-Kingdom time of China,

under the tender shade of 1,000-year-old maidenhair trees,



enjoying the lotus redolence from nearby pool,



and, playing GO with friends,



eating nice local snacks...



Enjoying such a simple life is fun for me.

I think the wikipedia article on Pachisi might be a good place to start as you launch yourself on your Grand Pachisi Muckabout.

As you begin to explore mods of the basic game, you just might find that bit about how, way back then, they used Cowrie shells instead of dice. Kind of makes you wonder what else you could substitute, and maybe even why. And once you read about the Pachisi-like game called "Charkoni," well, you just won't be able to keep from wondering what it might feel to move 25 squares on a single throw of six shells!

When you think you're ready to explore real world parallels between Pachisi and every day life, you might also find yourself almost more than amused by the discovery that Pachisi is a Cross and Circle game, with direct connections to things like mandalas, the earth and heavens, the self and the universe.

Play on!