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 CMS 608 Neil Dowgun Nick Ristuccia Zach Reeve Use the Fours Spring 2008 Project 4 Tension It s the key to every competitive game It hangs over the final table of Poker tournaments It prevents you from sitting down when there s five seconds left and your team is down by one Without it sports wouldn t be entertainment players would quit games halfway through and our lives would be much much poorer Our goal for this project was to design a game that maintains tension throughout the whole game so that players are constantly engaged For tension to run high on every turn there has to be uncertainty about who is going to win the game up until the very last turn On top of that every action has to be critical to the outcome of the game in a very tangible way simply compiling resources is not a strategy that requires a player to be on his or her toes There are excellent examples of games that already exist that are extremely intense on each turn Jenga for example forces the player to focus all the time because any one move could lose the game for them Likewise Russian Roulette is constantly intense because the game could be over at any moment for a less violent image picture people playing Hot Potato However these games usually end because of pure chance or because some player does something wrong we set a secondary goal for this game to make it winnable through positive player action We approached this game from the player s point of view focusing first not on a specific Mechanic but on what Aesthetic we wanted to game to have We learned much from Marc LeBlanc and used his MDA design approach Hunicke as well as his philosophy of failing quickly However it became clear even before we started testing out mechanics that there would be some significant constraints upon them First of all each player needs to have potential to clearly affect the outcome of the game on each and every turn This meant that we could not have a winning condition with any sort of point system unless very few points were needed to win To maintain the tension we also needed to make sure that EVERY player was involved ALL the time instead of taking their turn and then dozing off for a bit Of course if a game can be won on any turn usually players are going to try as hard as they can to make the most out of each turn so if there is a lot of information available and the mechanics and strategies are complex players could take a long time while deciding what to do This would lead to the other players becoming bored so we tried to keep the Mechanics of the game simple the strategies obvious and the information limited Thus we began with a simple Mechanic trading in cards to try and build a winning hand In order to make it based upon a skill and not luck we allowed players to draw cards that had already been discarded so they could use their memory to their advantage The first iteration of the game consisted of a deck of cards being laid out face down in a grid except that each player held 5 cards Players traded cards in one at a time to get new ones attempting to build a straight flush This game was not very fun it was quite difficult and there was almost not tension because it was so unlikely that anyone could actually accomplish the goal even with an excellent memory odds are it would take a couple dozen turns We decided to eliminate a portion of the deck and turn half the cards face up so that it would be easier for players to build up their hands We tried this two ways and neither one worked that well In one version you had to replace a face up card with another face up card In this game players had virtually identical sets of knowledge and it was easy to tell what the other player was going for This version was dominated by information that was known to all players and so it turned into more of a pure strategy game Games with Perfect Information Salen and Zimmerman ch 17 like chess tend to lose their tension when it becomes obvious that one player is going win and this actually happened during some of our tests of course it was not a game of perfect information but the vast majority of cards that were chosen were face up The other way we played was to replace face up cards with face down ones and vice versa The dominant strategy was obvious picking a face up card meant you knew what you were getting AND your opponents had no idea what you were throwing away This led to more and more of the cards being face down so that it became HARDER to win the game as play progressed This killed the tension because it was frustrating to be moving backwards away from your goal We realized that 1 that players needed to be constantly gaining information so that a winning hand would become increasingly likely and 2 that not every turn is a potential victory if players may only turn in one card at a time We tried allowing players to trade as many of their cards in as they would like and the game still proved challenging so we ran with that We also kept all the cards face down but required players to reveal what cards were being placed in the grid The benefit of this Mechanic is that all players have to pay attention to what the other players are doing during their turns or else they forfeit their only source of information Also all players have EXACTLY the same amount of information about what cards are currently in the grid assuming they don t forget so the longer a game goes without a winner the more nervous everyone will become that other players remember more than they do This is a key Mechanic from the games Memory and Stratego ideally the player gains more information as the game progresses but the result of turning over a card that has just been discarded gradually turns from a Certain outcome into a Risk and then into an Uncertain outcome again Salen and Zimmerman Ch 15 In practice this game is quite draining it requires much more concentration to play well than any other game we ve encountered However we were trying to make a game that kept players involved and this system certainly did that so we kept it The final iteration involved the creation of intermediate goals The variance in time it took to get a straight flush was too long it could take a few turns or it could take ages to reveal …