DiGRA & Vancouver

Btw, I have at least three engagements at the June conference: my own short paper about the Game Game, a roundtable about Game Design Research, and another roundtable where I represent Finnish game studies among an international selection of people. Cool :)

See you there!

1st Playtesting session

Okay, the first play-test was already months ago, but I decided to post about it anyway and follow soon with information from the 2nd test, as the 3rd one will be already next week.

Before the first playtesting session, I had some simulations - i.e. played the game by myself. Originally there was a points scoring system, with different combinations of cards giving points, but I started to become quite complex, so I decided to drop it for the first play-testing. I did not want the end game become a boring 'let's add them up' session where one player would win with a seemingly meaningless single point over another. Thus I opted for a voting, whihc I presumed would be more social in nature. The solution was to translate the cards and budget tokens of each player into votes, and then the players would allocate their votes between the players and their concepts. This would also give more value to the verbalisation of a concept, so that a fine selection of cards would not be the only way to win. Insetad, one could make up for lousy cards with clever pitching, 'selling' the concept to other players.

In the first test, there were four players, all with background in games and gaming. This was a deliberatley easy way to begin with, but then again, they also represented the target audience of GG: game designers, students, gamers, etc.

Some conclusions from the first play-test:

+ voting system generally a good solution

+ asset card descriptions were perceived as fun

+ generally the players embraced the improvised design tasks quite well

- basic set of available mechanics have to be tweaked: trading was weak, buying assets frequent (part of it was due to the fact the players were learning the elements and the game in general)

- procedure element cards will be abandoned in the next version, because they were difficult to verbalise (maybe too detailed/specific element)

+/- the players talk around the cards their design lacks

The last point refers to an observation where it was symptomatic for players to talk about a game element while pitching even if they did not have the card. For example, people started to describe the game's theme in quite intricate ways despite lacking the theme card. However, I do not see this as a big problem, because if implemented strictly, everybody would only be able to pitch concepts like 'there's this thing (a component) in this grid (environment) and then there's a goal...'. Keeping the card-pitching relation loose also helps in maintaining the general brainstorming nature of the game. Also, a partial solution would be instructing the Publisher more forcefully into giving feedback about the missing cards/elements.

I was quite pleased that the winning concept was indeed one that was verbalised and 'branded' in a sophisticated fashion, rather than one based on a formally good selection of cards. So the voting worked to the direction I was hoping for. In general, the concepts were quite hilarious, ranging from beer bottle recycling game to an online advergame world with cows and milk products :)

Games & Storytelling

This week has been spent designing games in the Games and Storytelling workshop in the Game Research Lab in Tampere. Katie Salen is tutoring us, and there is a nice bunch of enthusiastic and smart people present. More on the Game Game section later!

Play-testing & iterating

Just a quick note - I'm attending a workshop in Tampere tutored by Katie Salen, and I've had a chance to play-test the Game Game twice already. It's coming along pretty nicely, and definitely improving based on the feedback. There's a third playtesting session tomorrow when the workshop closes!

I hope to find time next week to post some notes and images!