Monday, March 22, 2010
"Life is Beautiful"
In an inspiring look at the human spirit, personality, and sacrifice, Life is Beautiful, an Italian film from 1997 that my wife and I watched this week, also features beautiful application of game mechanics. If you haven't seen the movie, I would highly recommend it, and I will try not to spoil it here, but I found it particularly interesting how the main character, played by Roberto Benigni, spends much of the film fictionalizing the horrors of WWII concentration camp into a game to help his family survive. Although I think the movie is only just based on a true story, it serves as another possible example of how useful game mechanics could be.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Muggins, A dominoes game
The rules in brief are as follows:
-Use a set of double 6 dominoes
-Draw 7 tiles (5 if 4 or more are playing)
-Player with highest double starts
-Players play off the starting double in up to four directions (from its endpoints and from its sides)
-Whenever all the endpoints equal to a multiple of five, player earns that amount of points
-Player with highest double starts
-Players play off the starting double in up to four directions (from its endpoints and from its sides)
-Whenever all the endpoints equal to a multiple of five, player earns that amount of points
-Doubles are played perpendicularly (so their sides match with an endpoint). Count both sides of a double for adding up a score.
-Only the starting double is considered a "spinner".
-If you can't play, draw a tile from the bone-yard
-Round ends when a someone goes out (plays their last domino).
-All other players add up the values of their remaining dominoes. These points go to the player who went out.
Endpoints equal 11 (no score).
These were the rules that my wife and I played at first, but when I looked in the rule set included in our box of dominoes, I found two rules variants:
1. When a player does not have a domino that is playable, they must draw from the bone-yard until they draw one that they can play.
2. Even if a player has a domino that is playable, they may still draw from the bone-yard.
I admit that the reason I went looking for Muggins, was because I wanted to find a domino game with more strategy than Mexican Train, so I felt free to use whichever rules added the most depth to the game. Question: Which of the two additional rules, then, did I add? The answer: Rule number 2. I quietly ignored ruled 1, since I think that rule would exacerbate moments when a player is unable to play, increasing the margin between victory and defeat. Rule two, on the other hand, gives players an interesting choice. On any turn they can play according to their hand, or increase their potential to score more points, by increasing the risk (remember that any unplayed dominoes are added up and awarded to the player who plays all their dominoes first). This rule also adds an interesting amount of opportunity cost associated with taking on extra dominoes instead of going out sooner.
In conclusion, my wife and I played Muggins again, but this time with Rule 2 from above added. The depth of game play was improved moderately, and I believe that the distinction between luck and skill has been widened, something I usually like.
Hooray for Muggins!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Res Life Wasabi! Picture
Here is a picture of the "Menu" that was made for our Res Life Wasabi game. Each week, a new menu is sent out to all of the Resident Adviser's with new rolls that they can complete. I have conveniently blacked out the actual e-mail addresses.
As much as I would like to claim the design of these beautiful menus I cannot...
As much as I would like to claim the design of these beautiful menus I cannot...
Monday, March 8, 2010
Res Life Wasabi
It shouldn't be a surprise, especially not now with this, my third post on the game Wasabi!, that I have undertaken, along with a small committee of coworkers to modify Wasabi! into an interactive game, playable among hundreds of students.
The premise was simple enough: in the actual board game, players create sushi rolls by combining ingredient tiles. In our modification, Res Life Wasabi!, Resident Adviser's gain points by completing sushi rolls as well, except that in our game, each recipe is a special combination of people (and places) that have to be photographed and sent to me in an e-mail. Each roll is assigned a number of points based on a standard (for example, for each person required to be in the photograph, the roll was assigned an additional 1 point). All the moderator (me) has to do is to keep track of e-mails as they come in, and input scores into an excel spreadsheet that I made.
The point of the game is of course to get the most points, and there is a reward tied to victory, but the purpose of the game is to get Resident Advisers to interact with one another, to meet each other, and to develop community by competing within the game. As with any massively interactive game such as this, there are three main criteria to evaluate how the game is going. First, are the rules clearly understandable and avoid loopholes? Second, is the game easy to moderate and keep-up with? And third, is the game accomplishing what its purpose?
In the two weeks that we have now been playing the game I would rate our successes as follows: Rules = B, Ease of Moderation = A-, Purpose = D
The Rules: While I undertook to make the rules as easy as possible to learn and follow, the simple adage about students has been winning out. They do not read, period. Of course I anticipated this problem. Instead of writing a big paragraph of rules, I subdivided the rules into 5 simple points, spelling S-U-S-H-I. "S" Select a sushi roll, "U" Unite the correct number of people, "S" Snap a photograph, "H" Highlight your achievement in an email to me, and "I" Invite others to start playing as well. All this is well and good, but when asked about Res Life Wasabi, many Resident Advisers said that they didn't understand what to do. Could the rules have been improved? Simplified even more? My guess is that people need to rules to be explained to them. It is good to have them in written form, and simple, but I think that most people prefer to be taught rather than learn themselves.
Ease of Moderation: Moderation is key to the success of any large interactive game. If rules are legislation, moderation is judicial. Excel is very helpful. A couple of years ago when I first started designing games like Res Life Wasabi, I used complicated excel spreadsheets with numbers splayed over several pages in no recognizable order. If anyone else wanted to get information from the spreadsheet then it would have been nearly impossible, and it certainly would have been impossible for me to teach my methods of keeping track of scores and actions of the different players to somebody else. In Res Life Wasabi, however, it was our plan to have dual-moderators, or two different people to whom emails of completed sushi rolls could be sent, myself and Jeff. I knew I would have t vastly simplify an excel workbook in order for anyone else to use it and understand it. Thankfully, I just finished a class in reporting accounting data through excel in which I picked up a handy list of excel functions. In the resulting workbook that I designed I used COUNTA, VLOOKUP, SUM, INDEX, and IF functions to simplify moderation so that all anyone has to do to input scores is to find a players name, and type the number of bonus points they received in a cell beneath the heading of the sushi roll they completed. Excel does the rest. If nothing else, I would consider this game a success for the ability of the excel file to accomplish what it does. Still, however, there are some difficulties involved, such as determining bonus points (I did not explain earlier that bonus points for every player in their first sushi roll picture) from the picture, and sorting through the large volume of RA names.
Purpose: If the purpose of the game was to build community between RAs, then, unfortunately, it does not seem to be working very well. Very few people (about 8%) have gotten involved. The main problem could be tied to the rules, that is, people don't understand the game so they don't play, but it could also be tied to the "fun factor". The rules that we set-up were relatively simple, but did we, in the name of simplicity, erase the concepts and points of novelty, which could have made a really great game? We kept the theme, we kept sushi rolls, we kept artwork (one of our committee is a graphic designer who put together some neat looking menus), and we kept points, but we eliminated spatial elements such as the restrictions of a board and tiles, as well as the bonus cards. In essence, I fear, that all we have left is a themed-up photo-scavenger hunt, which might require more work to play than the fun which could be gotten from it. In addition, previous games we have played were modifications of Capture the Flag, Monopoly, and Risk. I think that games like these pique peoples' interests because they have at some point in their lives enjoyed such games and wanted to play again. Wasabi!, however, is a fairly unknown game, and few have any idea of the fun that could be associated with it.
I could conjecture as to other reasons why the game has not gathered much steam, but for now, suffice it to say, that it is not really working. We have added some changes and tweaked some of the rules, and we have offered a reward (free sushi/steakhouse lunch) to the winner, but so far, these have done nothing to change the status quo. Any ideas?
The premise was simple enough: in the actual board game, players create sushi rolls by combining ingredient tiles. In our modification, Res Life Wasabi!, Resident Adviser's gain points by completing sushi rolls as well, except that in our game, each recipe is a special combination of people (and places) that have to be photographed and sent to me in an e-mail. Each roll is assigned a number of points based on a standard (for example, for each person required to be in the photograph, the roll was assigned an additional 1 point). All the moderator (me) has to do is to keep track of e-mails as they come in, and input scores into an excel spreadsheet that I made.
The point of the game is of course to get the most points, and there is a reward tied to victory, but the purpose of the game is to get Resident Advisers to interact with one another, to meet each other, and to develop community by competing within the game. As with any massively interactive game such as this, there are three main criteria to evaluate how the game is going. First, are the rules clearly understandable and avoid loopholes? Second, is the game easy to moderate and keep-up with? And third, is the game accomplishing what its purpose?
In the two weeks that we have now been playing the game I would rate our successes as follows: Rules = B, Ease of Moderation = A-, Purpose = D
The Rules: While I undertook to make the rules as easy as possible to learn and follow, the simple adage about students has been winning out. They do not read, period. Of course I anticipated this problem. Instead of writing a big paragraph of rules, I subdivided the rules into 5 simple points, spelling S-U-S-H-I. "S" Select a sushi roll, "U" Unite the correct number of people, "S" Snap a photograph, "H" Highlight your achievement in an email to me, and "I" Invite others to start playing as well. All this is well and good, but when asked about Res Life Wasabi, many Resident Advisers said that they didn't understand what to do. Could the rules have been improved? Simplified even more? My guess is that people need to rules to be explained to them. It is good to have them in written form, and simple, but I think that most people prefer to be taught rather than learn themselves.
Ease of Moderation: Moderation is key to the success of any large interactive game. If rules are legislation, moderation is judicial. Excel is very helpful. A couple of years ago when I first started designing games like Res Life Wasabi, I used complicated excel spreadsheets with numbers splayed over several pages in no recognizable order. If anyone else wanted to get information from the spreadsheet then it would have been nearly impossible, and it certainly would have been impossible for me to teach my methods of keeping track of scores and actions of the different players to somebody else. In Res Life Wasabi, however, it was our plan to have dual-moderators, or two different people to whom emails of completed sushi rolls could be sent, myself and Jeff. I knew I would have t vastly simplify an excel workbook in order for anyone else to use it and understand it. Thankfully, I just finished a class in reporting accounting data through excel in which I picked up a handy list of excel functions. In the resulting workbook that I designed I used COUNTA, VLOOKUP, SUM, INDEX, and IF functions to simplify moderation so that all anyone has to do to input scores is to find a players name, and type the number of bonus points they received in a cell beneath the heading of the sushi roll they completed. Excel does the rest. If nothing else, I would consider this game a success for the ability of the excel file to accomplish what it does. Still, however, there are some difficulties involved, such as determining bonus points (I did not explain earlier that bonus points for every player in their first sushi roll picture) from the picture, and sorting through the large volume of RA names.
Purpose: If the purpose of the game was to build community between RAs, then, unfortunately, it does not seem to be working very well. Very few people (about 8%) have gotten involved. The main problem could be tied to the rules, that is, people don't understand the game so they don't play, but it could also be tied to the "fun factor". The rules that we set-up were relatively simple, but did we, in the name of simplicity, erase the concepts and points of novelty, which could have made a really great game? We kept the theme, we kept sushi rolls, we kept artwork (one of our committee is a graphic designer who put together some neat looking menus), and we kept points, but we eliminated spatial elements such as the restrictions of a board and tiles, as well as the bonus cards. In essence, I fear, that all we have left is a themed-up photo-scavenger hunt, which might require more work to play than the fun which could be gotten from it. In addition, previous games we have played were modifications of Capture the Flag, Monopoly, and Risk. I think that games like these pique peoples' interests because they have at some point in their lives enjoyed such games and wanted to play again. Wasabi!, however, is a fairly unknown game, and few have any idea of the fun that could be associated with it.
I could conjecture as to other reasons why the game has not gathered much steam, but for now, suffice it to say, that it is not really working. We have added some changes and tweaked some of the rules, and we have offered a reward (free sushi/steakhouse lunch) to the winner, but so far, these have done nothing to change the status quo. Any ideas?
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