I have a strange relationship to winning. I don't really know what it is, i get uncomfortable around too much competition, especially sporting competition. it's never an impulse i've ever had, i was an only child an spent a lot of time playing on my own (not in a bad way i had no brother or sister to play with or more importantly against) but i played a lot, in fact i remember having my action figures out in room long after other friends of mine had theirs packed away in the garage or off to car boot sales (i also still have a lot of them littered about my house although now i can hide behind the ironic 'object d'art' statement).
the point is i loved to play but was never that bothered about winning probably because i didn't have to be and i think its translated through into my attitude now when i think about and undertake game like activities. Recently in Cardiff where we performed the first version of our latest game Follow the Bird, the game was followed through to the end by two ladies who were friends, who kept saying "i bet you haven't met anyone as competitive as us". Truth is i hadn't ever considered the enterprise as one that could be competitive. On reflection of course it is. As i mentioned in my previous post the whole idea of creating a series of success gates that naturally cut down the audience amount down to the final one is of course competitive i just had never considered it through that lens. We're now designing our Bristol game (on the 8th of May look out for the mini game to get your password to play) and working out how many players we can accommodate and the structure of the tasks, knowing that we need to end with a far smaller number than we started with and ultimately with a 'winner' ( although our last winner ended up putting her hand up a chicken as a prize).
Part of the reason i tend to not think about the competition inherent in these things is because i tend to focus more on the experience of playing. Looking around me at the games i'm studying and playing i read a description of euro games as games where the winner feels that they won through their superior skill and the losers felt they lost because luck was against them. This is an interesting definition that promotes the experience of play above that of winning or losing, as a successful piece of game design is one that the loser enjoys as much as the winner, the interaction with the game being rewarding enough for both. That's why a game such as monopoly can be so frustrating, to lose sometimes means being stuck in a downward spiral that you can't get out of and basically being slowly economically smothered to death, and the game is generally considered a bad piece of design.
So in a live game where we lose players through a series of stages how can we create a sense of play that survives them being eliminated? I'm not sure yet, i think a lot of it is critical to the stages in which they are eliminated. In his essay on procedural board game play Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about the pleasure of understanding the mechanics of play, so knowing the result of the dice roll and doing the necessary adjustments and calculating the resulting damage on your troops (in the case of a wargame) can be much more satisfying than seeing them get mowed down in computer game that hides the mechanics from you. So in the case of players if they are aware of the time based nature of some of the tasks and the competitive framework o the early stages of the game, not only is their participation imbued with the agency as afforded by the narrative but also an added urgency of the player to player interaction.
In our last game the player to player interaction ended up being one of fierce competition even though we had mainly designed the game as a solo endeavor. We've opened this one up, small teams can play but i don't quite know what to expect in terms of purposefully fostering competition, especially when it becomes apparent that the players may need each other rather than need to beat each other. In board game terms 'interaction' often means that you have to trade or beat your opponents and as a rule the competitive nature of play interests me less than emergence or co-operation, as I'm never sure what meaning can truly emerge from the base competitive instinct or desire to win, I'm sure there is one i just need to get more comfortable with accommodating it. So perhaps a word of advice, if you ever play one of our games remember, I'm not sure i like winners and you too may end up with your hand up a chicken
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