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MIT CMS 608 - Tron- the Board Game

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MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu CMS.608 / CMS.864 Game Design Spring 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.Nick Ristuccia Zach Reeve Neil Dowgun 4/17/08 Tron : the Board Game Although Tron the movie is a very complex exploration of the digital world abstracted into a real life atmosphere, it is most recognized through a mini-game the characters play. In that mini game players race "Light-Cycles" (futuristic, enclosed motorcycles) against each other across a grid. Each racer leaves a 'tail' or a solid wall behind it as it moves across the grid, thus any player who tries to cross that tail will ultimately crash. The goal of the game then is to eliminate the other players. This is the activity that our game is based upon. This game in its most basic form is flawed. Given that the racers start side by side and move at similar rates the logical strategy would lead to each player spiraling on half the grid space until eventually they both run out of room and crash at the same time (Figure 1). The problem is that the game is both deterministic and has only a single goal that both players are trying to achieve. Our implementation addresses these issues. We dealt with the singular goal flaw by introducing a capture the flag based play mode with a scoring system. Now instead of victory being determined solely by survival it is attained by a scoring system which gives values to kills, captures, and deaths. We also introduced randomness and hidden information to deal with the deterministic nature of the game. First we introduced a random card drawing for the placement of the flags as well as the placement of the racers following a crash. We introduced new "special cards" to go along with our base "turn" and "move forward" cards. These cards are held in a players hand such that the other players know how many special cards a player has but they have no information of which exact cards the player is holding.Figure 1: The Problem Our play testing strategy for Tron was to brainstorm new rules and additions, discuss how this would change the game/system, play the game once with the rule variants we agreed upon, and finally start over with brainstorming again. For our first iteration through the play testing process we started out simple by allowing each player(three total) to select his starting spot on a 15X15 grid, we then had each player draw cards at random to place his flag on the grid. The goal was to score three flag captures, there were no points awarded or removed for kills. Each player had three cards, one to move forward, one to turn left, and one to turn right. Each of the cards implied a one grid space movement in the desired direction, and each player would lay down their card for the given turn simultaneously. In this first attempt we allowed tails to reach a maximum length of ten grid spaces.Figure 2: Example Game While the first iteration was enjoyable to the players, there were many issues raised. Far too much of the game’s objective information was perceivable to all players (Salen Zimmerman 208-210). All players knew that their opponent and they themselves would undoubtedly move one square on their next turn. Though a player had the choice of what direction to go, the dynamics of movement and interplay, as defined by Hunicke, rarely escaped the predictability realm (Hunicke 3). This is particularly true when a player is enacting a strategy. For example: if an in-game situation exists where one player is an optimal five moves away from a flag, and an opponent lies an optimal eight moves away, the closer player is committed to an optimal path, in order to capture a flag before an opponent. This player can only spare a brief divergence from an optimal path. It was a very pressing issue that the game was deterministic. Once the flags were placed, players had very few choices to make. Because information on the board is known to all players, any opponent can easily decipher this player’s future moves and quite easily figure out an optimal path that will with little doubt be taken by a player and ultimately lead to a flag being captured. All opponents knew they were virtually helpless to stop this player from capturing a flag. All the interaction that came about was fairly predictable with the limited amount of moves available. In general this iteration was simply a predetermined race-game to the nearest flag with little interaction between players (Partlett 8-9). The game had already decided where flagswould be placed (Salen, Zimmerman 205). Meaningful play cannot exist when an outcome is predetermined, because predetermination is not complex (Salen Zimmerman 152-158). Furthermore, the player who is farther away from the flag may only reach the flag if the closer player miscalculates and diverges too far from the optimal path. In other words, the closer player messes up. The strategy of hoping another player makes a mistake hardly stirs up dramatic tension when skilled players rarely make a mistake (Hunicke 3). Additionally, the severe unlikeliness of such an outcome occurring among skilled players prevents the strategy from being viable. In truth, this method of winning can be interpreted as chance that another player makes a mistake, and no meaningful play can occur amongst skilled players when progression is purely chance based instead of skill based. Chance is not complex (Salen Zimmerman 152-158). Random flag placement was intended to minimize path predictability. If it were known beforehand where a flag would reappear on the game board, players would invariably drive their tokens to advantageous positions. Again, the same situation would occur as mentioned above where a player could unquestionably obtain a flag by sticking to an optimal path. With all future moves known or easily calculable, the entire Tron game would be far too predictable to be meaningful (Salen Zimmerman 152-158). With random flag placement, the game existed as a series of deterministic paths. Although in the long run this iteration seemed deterministic, the random placing of flags made it impossible for players to know or determine who would win. That information, in Celia Pearce’s terms, was only known to the game (Salen, Zimmerman 205-208). Some drama was stirred up as players hoped that the benevolence of the game’s decision would reveal advantageous cards. This is akin to many games of


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