Tag Archives: street games

Hide & Seek & Aliens Among Us

Posted by under game design, street games

The third Hide & Seek Weekender is kicking off in a couple of days, and should be fantastic. Three more days of brilliant, gorgeous and eccentric social, street and pervasive games, in and around the South Bank. I’ve been privy to a lot of the plans and preparations—Spaaace has been sharing office-space with Hide & Seek for a couple of months, which is a truly sweet deal—and there are some very cool things coming up. Head over to the Weekender’s own website for a glimpse of what’s coming up, and if you’re anywhere near the National Theatre in London on Friday, Saturday or Sunday then you’d be a fool not to drop in.

Of special interest to traditional gamers is an event I’m running on Friday night: ALIENS AMONG US. This is a post-Werewolf/Mafia game, which is to say a social game for a large group in which a minority of the group are intent on killing everyone, and the rest of the group has to work out who they are and kill them first. The difference between Werewolf/Mafia and Aliens Among Us is that in Aliens Among Us everyone has big guns.

AAU is not my game. Well, okay, this iteration of it is, but I didn’t come up with the core idea. The game was originally devised by Erick Wujcik, sometime in the early 1980s—which makes it extraordinarily early for a game of this type, predating Mafia/Werewolf by five years. The thing is, he never published it. In fact, as far as I can tell and I’ve asked a bunch of people, he never even wrote it down as a playtest set of rules. He did, however, play it with many groups at conventions and gatherings around the world, and he would describe it enthusiastically to fellow games designers, such as myself. I only heard the description once. Once was enough to know it was genius.

In the James Wallis 12″ dance-remix it goes like this:

  1. Earth has been invaded by aliens. Lots of them. The human-to-alien ratio is about 10:1. Aliens and humans look identical, and can only be differentiated after they are dead.
  2. Aliens want to kill all the humans. As a result the humans want to kill all the aliens.
  3. You are a member of the Ultimate Defence Force (because the Penultimate Defence Force didn’t really work out.) You are tasked with seeking out and destroying all aliens. Some collateral damage is inevitable, of course, and is expected.
  4. The UDF has itself been infiltrated by aliens. Some say it’s been heavily infiltrated—so heavily that the ratio of humans and aliens in its ranks is more like 5:1
  5. Humans get 5 points for killing an alien, minus 1 for every human they kill. Aliens get 1 point per human they kill, minus 5 if they kill an alien.
  6. The number of points your character has when they die (and they will die) is the number of points you have to generate your next character.

Erick ran the game as a conventional post-Gygax/Arneson RPG, with GM and players. I’m not doing that: I’m going to brief the players and let them get on with it, intervening only to deliver updates on the situation. I’ve also wonked the character-generation bit for a more general audience. In my version you don’t buy attributes or skills; you buy the two things that really matter in a game like this: (a) your rank in the UDF, from boy scout to general; and (b) your weaponry, from pointy stick to portable 22-kiloton warhead.

Erick Wujcik, as some as you know, is someone with whom I had a troubled history. He started off as my mentor in the industry, stalled my career for three years and ended up shoving an enormous blade into my back. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. The thing is, whatever he was like as a person or a business associate, there’s no question that he was a brilliant games designer. Also there’s no copyright in game concepts, and I firmly believe that Aliens Among Us is too good an idea to let die with its creator.

So there’s this playtest at the Weekender, and if it comes together then I’ve been talking to an American games designer about various possibilities, and—well, if that comes together too then it will do so with a rightness and a pleasingness that I think will satisfy anyone who knew Erick or his work.

I’ll keep you posted.

The shape of things to come…

Posted by under game design, narrative, street games

…may very well be hexagonal.

The cat is not fully out of the bag yet, but I think we are finally at a stage where we can admit there is a cat and a bag, and the two are in proximity, and the cat is very much alive. Not so much Schrodinger’s cat as Humdinger’s.

Also, look out for a very interesting ARG-related announcement on 1st October, which will explain why this post has the ‘charity’ tag.

Out and about

Posted by under street games

Mr D. Hon has already done the honours on this one, but since I booked the pub I feel I should also publicise it a bit: the third monthly London Gamer Geeks pubmeet will happen on 20th June (Wednesday), 6.30pm, downstairs in the College Arms on Store Street WC1. The focus is mostly but not entirely talking about the kind of video-games that make sales people break out in a rash. Sometimes we also talk about other types of games. The most-played game last month was pool, though Lee did get me into a head-to-head battle on the Pokemon match-three-tiles title whose name escapes me, and gave me a predictable thrashing. Anyway, it’s a good laugh.

On a not entirely dissimilar note, spurred by a blog post by Mr A. Hon a while back, I have fulfilled a long-promised pledge and mapped out a fifteen-hole frisbee golf course for Clapham Common. (The main similarity with the games night is that it ends up in the pub.) There’s more information on my Flickr page if you want to try it for yourself—yes, hole 9 does go through the bandstand—or if you fancy a get-together for an informal tournament then give me a shout and we’ll arrange a time.

Not much about storytelling in games or stirring players’ emotions this time, I’m afraid. Too busy thinking about cricket.

A Hiding to Nothing?

Posted by under game design, street games

So Hide and Seek the pervasive games festival happened over the weekend. It was a shame it was such a rainy, vile three days for it. But people seemed to have a good time regardless. And it was interesting to see a games event organised by a group with a primarily theatrical background rather than a more pure game-based approach (I have to wonder how Mind Candy would have done an event like this.)

I won’t go into too much detail about the organisation and structure of the whole thing, because I don’t want to come over as a know-it-all wise after the fact. But I will say that if you’re organising a four-hour game that takes over a hundred players on a chase across London and finishes with a party on the Thames beach below the Festival Pier, you should read the tide tables to check the beach will actually be there.

The last event was a debate about whether “Pervasive Games are the new Punk Rock”. No, they’re not. Don’t be silly. Punk was about spontaneity, ease of access, low barriers to entry and rebellion. It was about this
Now form a band
and this

It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it

It was about doing it for yourself. It wasn’t about getting a grant from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and putting on a three-day event at the BFI. Pervasive games of this kind have a huge and inherent divide between organiser and audience/players, which is completely anti-punk. Journey to the End of Night could have been a completely autonomous, self-running, more ‘punk’ experience if the organisers had made the chasers simply a different class of player; or it could have been all about the play-experience if the chasers had been more tightly co-ordinated and briefed (functioning as NPCs, to use an RPG term). In the event it fell between… ah, but I said I wouldn’t go there.

Though it’s worth noting thatif anyone’s got a cool arty game-project they want to get off the ground the Jerwood Foundation seems to be a soft touch for funding.

Tomorrow: GaMES

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.