Week 3 - Design Reflection

Trying to design a game with certain goals in mind was both interesting and challenging. In particular, creating a game that didn’t favor athletic ability took a lot of thoughtful design. Most folk games are very physical, so designing one that could be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of ability, was a major concern of our team. We decided to create a fully cooperative game so that any advantage one player had would benefit all the players. The next issue was making this model fun. Our solution was to introduce substantial constraints on player movement to create a suitable challenge for the players while also creating an opportunity for strategy. Players could move until their feet touch the ground after catching the bag, so experimenting with different movements was encouraged. The mechanic of linking added a further constraint by, “putting limits on player actions and interactions with the objects, other players, and the playspace with the intention of creating a play experience” (Macklin and Sharp, ch. 2). It gave players an incentive to catch the bag by introducing consequences. If you drop the bag you cannot move, and, if you do rejoin the game by linking with other players, you now have a substantial handicap to your already limited movement. Both rules encourage players to catch the bag but do not over-penalize those who drop it. This type of play is what Macklin and Sharp describe as “asymmetrical cooperative play” (ch. 3). As the game progressed, the players would have to follow different rules depending on if they were linked to other players or not. Since the goal of the game is for all the players to reach the end, everyone would have to work together to overcome the challenge of the game.

A turning point in the design process, at least for myself, was simply giving the game a name. The introduction of a theme gave purpose to the rules. The actions were still an abstraction of events on a battlefield, but, as Macklin and Sharp put it, the introduction of a theme helped the players to “understand the game more quickly and intuitively” (ch. 2). Before our game had a name, we used general terms to describe certain objects and goals in our game. We would say the goal of our game was to “reach a certain point in the room” or that when you drop the bag “you just sit down”. Now we had a theme to pull ideas from when describing our game. Now the goal was to “reach the rescue point” and helping “downed” players had a more logical reason behind it besides simply finishing the game. According to Macklin and Sharp, ”theme provides a way to interpret the decisions and their outcomes on the game’s space of possibility” (ch. 2). That is exactly what our name did, not only for the players but for us as designers as well. Suddenly our game had a larger, more concrete purpose than simply “get from point A to point B”. It framed the concepts and actions of the game in a new light and drew a logical consistency between all the aspects of the game.