Our DiAC department at the IT University doing field work this Thursday:
The game was the cryptically titled “ST? Game”, that Gonzalo and I had designed. Basically a simultaneous turn-based combat game with red and blue teams (distinguished by the color of their office binders) battling to steal student credits from each other by way of paper planes, crumbled paper balls and “daggers” (postit-notes).
The game was a reasonable success even though there were some balancing issues that needed attention:
-It turned out that it was much easier to revive other people than anticipated, and hence the game had a tendency to reach an equilibrium between the two teams.
-The crumbled paper balls were way more useful than other weapons, so their strength should probably be downgraded.
-The amount of student credits in the game was constant, so the more players were dead, the harder it was to kill the remaining players.
Emergent gameplay:
We had given players office binders to keep track of teams and to help them carry all their items. A popular unanticipated tactic was to collect as many paper balls as you could in your binder, and then simply pour them onto other players.
Interesting how the path of least resistance in game design generally tends towards concepts of “attack”, “defense”, etc, no matter how abstract the mechanics are? I guess at heart they’re still about conflict, and those concepts are intrinsic to conflict.
Always interested to hear about folks in the academic sphere trying their hand at design!
Yep, combat is always straightforward. And easy to explain too.
Additionally, it seems to always be fun to throw things at other people?
That makes a lot of sense when you consider that throwing is one of the few physical feats where we out-perform just about every other creature on Earth. Throwing leverages our 3D vision, uniquely constructed (upright-walking) arms and our eye-hand coordination. Unsurprisingly shooting, which is just tool-assisted throwing (arm > sling > bow > gun), has received exhaustive attention in the videogame medium.
It’s almost like direct, individual-against-individual combat, with shooting, is one of the most natural types of agonistic play. Easy to see why Quake deathmatch was such a sensation back in the day.
I think you’re having way too much fun. I also think that if you really get into tweaking the design of this, you may get addicted to it and never stop playing. :-)
JP: I completely agree about throwing, But I also think there is some special form of social contact in throwing stuff at other people – it’s kind of making contact. You only throw stuff at people to whom you are not indifferent.
There is something innately horrifying about 250 lbs. of Espen Aarseth chucking things at you. I get the shivers everytime I look at that image. Maybe you can introduce that game after your talk on Friday – without the huge Norwegian participant.
Don’t worry, Tore, I’ll be in Norway all day tomorrow. But when I get back to ITU, perhaps we can playtest adding a rugby element?
Yikes…
I completely agree with JP, the fact that human has the ability to use “projectiles” does indeed put us ahead of the other living creatures on this planet. Colin Tudge mentioned this particular feat in his book THE TIME BEFORE HISTORY on mankind’s revolution, which gave us alot of advantage over other predators. With projectile weaponaries, we are able to inflict damage on other entities without being too close to them, and as we master this skills, we become almost invulnerable to “melee” attacks. :-)
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