A while back, I found this paper in Simulation & Gaming. Peppered with academic jargon and referencing, at 18 pages, it’s a bit chunky for the casual audience. That said, Zagal, Rick & Hsi (the paper’s authors) have done a good job of outlining a useful way of thinking about games in terms of player dynamics.

In this system, play can be broken down into three types: competitive, cooperative, and collaborative.

Competitive play is the form we’re most used to. With the goals of players directly opposed, this is a zero-sum game. Zagal, Rick & Hsi give us the examples of chess and checkers.

In contrast, cooperative play includes situations where different players have interests which are “neither completely opposed nor completely coincident” (link).  They oftern include “enforceable rules for negotiating or bargaining that allow players to identify a desirable outcome for the parties involved.”  Think about player-triggered auctions and bargaining in Monopoly, the classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” or resource trading in something like Settlers of Catan.  The goal is not just to win, but to win before anyone else.

Finally, we have collaborative play, in which all the players “work together as a team, sharing the payoffs and outcomes; if the team wins or loses, everyone wins or loses”.  Explicitly collaborative games are a lot rarer, with the article relying on the Lord of the Rings boardgame – in which the players work together to destroy the one ring.  Here on the Playmakers game blog, Rohan has already talked about what it might mean for the this project to be a collaborative process, and I daresay he’ll expand on that at a later stage.

In relation to Playmakers, the nature and structures of the-game-as-it-stands rest heavily on the team dynamic. Here, play has been primarily competitive between teams, and collaborative within them. The effect of introduing team traitors (as in “Surveilllance“) changed this by introducing uncertainty to the in-team collaborative dynamic.

In the prep for tonight’s playtest (Soho Spy Squad), Holly mentioned her concern that we could see an emergent form of play in which two teams might cooperate to film each other, essentially screwing over the other team without their knowledge. We’ve tried to discourage this kind of play in our handling of the rules, by deciding not to award points for filming of an ‘enemy’ camera while they’re filming you.

Also, in among our feedback for the week was an email from Adam Hoyle, who spun us off in an entirely different direction:

“Could the players be directed to re-create classic films, or at least using classic films as the base – this would mean each team is potentially filming a different film, which might not scale too well, or alternatively it could be a single film that is split into chunks and each team films a couple of chunks each. Then all the films could be somehow spliced together (possibly manually, if clapper boards or similar are used) so the end effect is collaborative as well as competitive (share the love, bask in the warm glow)”

QUESTION: What do you think?  Have we got the right balance of competitive, cooperative and collaborative play?  Let us know!