GameGame 2.0 Released

My study leave kicks off with new version of the GameGame. Please visit the site for more info.

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 :)

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!

the premise

Because my thesis is strongly aimed for practical applications in game studies and design, one of its case studies is a game that demonstrates the theory and its concepts. The approach is somewhat similar to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: a theory of comics in the form of a comic book.

Respectively, the ‘Game Game’ is a card game where the players design games by collecting elements that make up a design for a game. The elements are represented by various types of cards.

Ok, let's start with an introduction to the game itself:

The objective of the game is to come up with a rudimentary design for a game. Players collect cards in order to achieve this. There are mandatory cards that each design should have, and extra cards that the player may use to make his/her design more effective and sophisticated.

The cards and their combinations give points, and after three rounds – ‘milestones’ – the player with most points is the winner. The game ends once the third milestone is completed. In practice, this happens when the third and final deck of cards is depleted.

The cards are implemented according to mytheory of game elements, i.e. there are goal, component and theme cards, etc. In addition there are also cards representing the compound elements: specific rule cards, such as victory/end condition cards, and a number of cards representing game mechanics which can be combined into whatever combinations the player desires.

So-called behavioural elements are represented by ‘emotion cards’ which incorporate another theoretical topic of the thesis to the game: a so-called mood typology which aims at producing a theoretical framework of the emotional spectrum that games in different genres afford for their players.

There are also deliberately scarce resources in the form of budget and asset cards. Managing these resources helps the players to progress from one milestone to another. The milestones encourage the players into role-playing as they have to ‘pitch’, i.e. verbalise, their design idea for the player that possesses the ‘producer card’ at that time. The selling mechanic is implemented for pedagogic purposes so that the players would also learn something general about game structures, and so forth the theory, in the process of playing the game.

This is meant to illustrate the rhetoric nature of game design, i.e. game design as persuasion, which is another topic of Games without Frontiers. A specific design solution is adopted in order to support pleasurable social interaction among the players: in the end, the players allocate their points into a vote for the winning concept and its designer.

That's it for the intro: I'll return shortly with some experiences from the first play-testing session!