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 flags would 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 chance where players hope that fate or the game will smile upon them This is Roger Caillois Alea in its purest form Caillois 133 135 However to avoid situations of extreme