Showing posts with label board games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label board games. Show all posts

Monday, September 4, 2017

How To Tell A Story With A Video Game (even if you don't make or play games)


This post is a summary of a talk I gave at Storycode NYC on August 22nd, 2017. All the slides are available here. It is a primer for storytelling in games, intended for people who aren't gamers or game developers, but who want to get into interactive storytelling / immersive storytelling (like VR / AR / etc).

Video game design has much to offer interactive designers, even if you don't make or play any video games. When I taught at Parsons, we taught game design as part of our general design / technology curriculum, because this field has been thinking about the aesthetics of digital interaction for literally decades.

So if we want to tell a story with a video game, we should first ask, what is a video game made of? Some men have opinions on this:

Famous game designer Sid Meier has a famous quote: "a game is a series of interesting choices." When we play games, we're constantly making choices and feeding input into the game -- which way should Pac-Man go, how far should Mario jump? Some designers even treat the lack of input as an input. Inaction as an action.

My boss / NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz has a slightly less famous, but much more handsome quote: "a game is an opera made out of bridges." What he means is that a video games often try to present a sort of audio / visual "total work of art" spectacle that demands your complete attention and immersion, but to achieve that bombastic effect we also have to engineer physics simulations and future-proof code bases to work for many years. And if we're going to go with a bridge metaphor, we should also ask, what are these "bricks" and building blocks that make up video games?

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in video games.



Desperate Gods, by Wolfire Games, is a virtual board game made for Fuck This Jam; you have a bunch of virtually simulated tokens and cards, but you must process and execute the game rules yourself. You can easily cheat, but then what's the point?

DG is not the first game or toolset to do this, although it's certainly the most polished and nicest looking so far. LackeyCCG, for instance, gives you a deck builder, a table, some tools for keeping track of state, then walks away and lets you get to it. The rationale, from their FAQ:
Q: Does LackeyCCG force people to follow a CCG's rules? Will it allow me to do something that isn't legal?
A: LackeyCCG does not implement rules forcing. I have tried other methods of playing CCGs online and I have found that forcing rules adherence just serves to bog down the game and makes it much less fun to play. Lackey allows you to simplify your turn when not much interesting is happen (so you can get to the more fun parts of a game faster). LackeyCCG will allow you to do anything you could do if you were playing with real cards. It also allows for a more formal adherence to the rules if you want to play that way, but it doesn't force any particular play style.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Butte, Montana. 1973; a board game about open-pit mining.

Last semester I made "Feng Shui," a board game where two players discuss (or argue?) over how to place furniture using chopsticks. This semester I've made "Butte, Montana. 1973." (as in "Beaut" or "Bee-yoot" but not "Butt")

It's an art board game (or board art game? or bored art game?) about open-pit mining. And it's a box of dirt. It's not terribly interesting as a "game qua game" -- if you want that, go play Catan or Call of Honor or something -- but it's an attempt at wondering what else one can do with a game. It also made me realize that video game designers should be forced to make analog games more often.


First, a bit about the design theory that supposedly powers this beast:

Friday, September 10, 2010

5 in 5: Feng Shui (analog board game)


"5 projects in 5 days" is part of my coursework at Parsons. The complete rules are here, but my own additional design constraints are (a) gotta be a game, (b) gotta be made in less than 3 hours.

Brenda Brathwaite said something along the lines of "all video game designers should make nondigital analog games too." So I decided to try it. First I just made some weird pieces of furniture out of cardboard and masking tape, and then I started playing around with them to see what was fun. I tried stacking them, I tried flinging pens at them... and then I used my pens as chopsticks, and a game design suddenly materialized in front of me...