In among our first burst of feedback, the team got a nifty email from game design superstar Jane McGonigal, who urges us to consider Playmakers in terms of golf:
“This is my favorite definition of a game: “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
You have a lot of goals and not enough “unnecessary obstacles”. What you’ve got so far is a contest, or a challenge – in my opinion. It’s a competitive activity but not a game. You need more absurd limitations on how the goals can be achieved.
Take golf. As a golf player, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes golf a game is the fact that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each hole, and to swing at the ball with a club. That’s not at all an obvious to get a ball in a hole. Golf is engaging exactly because you, along with all the other players, have agreed to make the work more challenging than it has any reasonable right to be. Add to that challenge a reliable feedback system – you have both the objective measurement of “is the ball in the hole or not”, plus the tally of how many strokes you’ve made – and you have a system that not only allows you to know when and if you’ve achieved the goal, but also holds out the hope of potentially achieving the goal in increasingly satisfying ways: in fewer strokes, or against more players.
You need to make your players stand far away from the hole and use a club, to speak metaphorically.”
QUESTION: Is Jane right? And if so, where should we be looking for our bunkers, long grass, and unexpected water features?
(Images by Avant Game and Smaku)
I think this is an interesting way to look at the game design of Playmakers. Am writing this late from India so full blog post will follow, but some thoughts it provokes:
1. The Shrine playtest featured a bucket of (holy) water strung to the bottom of the Humongous Filming Device. The teams also had to suspend a holy parasol above the HFD. This served two purposes: it slowed the players down, but it also improved the quality of video that the game generated (to a degree: still not that great to watch). Maybe there are some things we can do to the HFD that would introduce complexity to the game and ALSO create better video?
2. I love golf. I have played it with my Dad and brother since i was young. I know golf gets a bad wrap, but I’ve never played a game that tests your nerve more… Can we introduce that test of nerve, of skill into the game somehow/
3. One thing that springs to mind is, rather than having all cameras on all the time, you have to emulate the golf thing of traversing a space in a limited amount of ’shots’. Shots in this case being film shots, not golf shots. SO you have one target at one end of the game space, and one target at the other. Teams have to film the best sequence of ’shots’ to get from one to the other.
4. FILM GOLF may in fact be a completely different game. But i do like it
Comment by alexfleetwood — May 28, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
I would have thought that the other teams were your bunkers and unexpected water features. Or, more accurately, the open spaces that they can render dangerous by filming, or by sending out a few threatening scouts. You can’t walk right up to each game object and film it in a vacuum; you have to find a safe route, and keep your eyes open, and decide how to split your time between object-finding and team-hunting.
Is it working out like that in practice?
Comment by Kevan — May 28, 2009 @ 9:18 pm
I’m not sure that it is working out quite that way, Kevan. I think that the scoring mechanic doesn’t make enough distinction between the two – and knowing, even at the end of the game, whether your strategy for winning was effective (for example, that choosing to pursue other teams at the expense of getting all the targets) was the right one.
It may be that the scoring system is over complicated, and simplifying it will help.
Or it may be that we need to think of something completely different.
Comment by alexfleetwood — May 29, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
Hmmm. Interesting analogy, but worth steaming at it from a developmental direction. What’s the game about? What’s the seed from which it developed? What’s the core action it’s gaming? What’s the most exciting thing about it?
In golf’s case, it’s not about the hole. It’s the action of hitting a ball with clubs primarily, making it go where you want. The hole is the target to focus that action. That also – according to my – ahem – Wiki knowledge – appears to be how it arose historically. Although we can always bunk history and focus on what’s exciting.
I’ve yet to play Playmakers, but here’s my outsider and naive eye – tell me what I’m getting wrong, I’ve not even seen a ruleset… It appears that both the core and the most exciting action is to spy without being spied. The camera is the means and the target and the scoring mechanism.
I also think that the very best games have both emergence and elegance.
The challenge is dynamic and emergent – great – because you’re playing in conflict with other teams with the same (counter)objective.
The targets are a secondary mechanism and possibly an inelegance. Getting watchable footage is a secondary goal for the makers but not necessarily for the players; while I understand why you want it, you want to be careful it doesn’t wreck the gameplay.
The biggest problem appears to be that there are a limited number of meaningful roles in the core action because each team only has one video camera. Naive thinking: what would happen if you gave everybody a digital stills camera?
And now I’m thinking of chess, they are the pawns and the video camera is the queen (and the king). So you score points for pawn x pawn, more points for pawn x queen, and the most points for queen x queen. Points upped for soonest capture.
Comment by TS — June 1, 2009 @ 11:34 am
I also like (the very different game of) Film Golf.
Comment by TS — June 1, 2009 @ 11:35 am