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 Spring 2008 Neil Dowgun, Nick Ristuccia, Zach Reeve Project 4 Use the Fours 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 havea 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 playeris 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