Yesterday we mainly solidified the six in game-characters and some of the visual feel behind the piece, and its going to look great which will go a long way towards curating the experience from the offset.
we also got stuck pretty deep into some maths, and working out the relationships between the various elements and statistics and variables. The relationship between the players and the mechanics in the game is obviously central to the experience, but the whole point of the live experience is that the experience itself is the corner stone of the event and the mechanics are hidden as deep as possible into the theme. the the book Third Person Matthew Kirschenbaum writes a brilliant essay about table top wargames as emergent story engines. For him the pleasure of play and the meaning is derived from the undertaking of the procedural mechanics of play (rolling dice, looking up results on charts and tables ect..) so by creating a a game where we set out to hide those very things do we risk depriving the player of some of the key pleasure of game play, and more worryingly i feel the ability to consider their choices strategically and understand what constitutes a meaningful action and its consequence?
The Agency is obviously a live time-based experience, and it is the mechanic that will hopefully allow the live experience to flourish, i'm currently working on the feedback of the statistics for the players as a series of live graphs that adjust as the game plays out and finding a level of immediate clarity so that they don't need explaining. The same is true of the character sheets that the players are given at the beginning of the game, these are the closets thing to rules that the players will be provided with, without ever actually being rules themselves.
The recent advert for the apple I-pad has a sentence in it which says "you already know how to use it", this is what apple are incredibly successful at as UI designers and it is this level of clarity that we are looking for, the more explaining we need to do the more we reveal the mechanics and the more we take away from the seamlessness of the live experience. Again this is not a simulation, nor do i believe in the idea of total immersion in performance but in the Agency we hop to take the mechanic away for the players to be able to make emotive choices, character and moral driven choices instead of decisions based on points and scores.
and finally we made a key gameplay decision with which i am very pleased about the resources with which everything it built in the game, the players' financial fund will all come from a central pot the spending of which the players must negotiate amongst each other and all choices happen at once, getting rid of any sort of staggered turn based system, the game instead becomes more of a bartering and interaction driven system with the players all affecting each other, letting them drive the play, rather than the chance game events drive them.
i'll post some screenshots of the stats screens soon.
B.
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