The Agency, debrief
This is a slightly belated recap of The Agency, our strategy and ‘immersive’ board game experience, that we originally performed For Hide And Seek down in London (at the ICA and the National) and thanks to some money from the lovely people over at Arts Council England developed it for a week in Bradford as part of a residency at the Univeristy.
There’s stuff about the game and what happens in it ect in the posts below this one, and they will give you some context if you need it.
Over the 15 or so games we played we presented everything from a perfect session to quite ropey fragmented versions. Every game was a slightly altered iteration and although that was in itself an incredible luxury in terms of the work’s development, it also meant there was never a constant against which to measure the game’s progression, but come the end of the process it feels like we’ve arrived at a version that we are all pleased with and feels solid enough to go out as –is for a while.
We spent the greatest portion of out time finessing the rules and the language in which they were presented. The whole process has been a constant shifting scale of functional V.S texture, and at its greatest moments of success the rules and mechanics have coincided and melded with the texture in such a way that the world of the game demands the rule in a completely organic manner. One of the key properties of the game that we wanted was for the audience to be able to participate in a deep and complex game of strategy inspired by Euro Games, and other complex board games (of which I personally am a big fan) but to be able to access it through an almost intuitive level as served through the emerging narrative of the game itself. I try and not to tread too closely to board-games apart from that initial starting point, just because they are very different beasts, and although there may be some mechanical crossover, the core experience at the centre of it all are worlds apart.
In fact the experience is at the heart of The Agency, when I refer to the texture of the game I am talking about all of the individual elements that create the experience of being in the situation room of the game. To al intents and purposes we are creating an immersive experience, even though immersion is a word I am increasingly suspicious of, partly because it is over and mis-used. Trying to find immersion if a constant struggle against the imperative of rules, not just in the world of games. We come from a theatrical background where immersion is very much du-jour, and executed with varying degrees of success. There are a series of political and ethical considerations that are sadly too unexplored within immersion as it is employed in the theatre, often a shorthand for surrender to the experience, becoming part of it, but is rarely accompanied by any true sense of agency or with the creation of a space that is in any way open to re-configuration through participation. Immersion often represents a narrowing of the rules of engagement as the audience negotiate an uncertain world trying to remain immersed whilst fundamentally remaining passive. This is largely I feel a semantic issue as audiences, producers and promoters mislabel experiences as immersive when immersion is perhaps not the work’s core property.
But back to our game, a structure that demands participation and a group of players to affect the space of play. The immersion we sought to create was one of narrative and emotional engagement as permitted through the rules of play, and this was created partly though mechanics but also through world creation. The star of the game in the end became the country of TIGALI itself. We spent a long time on our various drives across the country making up a back-story to Tigali, and its 16 regions, giving ecah one some of the texture I keep talking about, and as we progressed the game we offered the information more readily and openly to the players. As we gradually infiltrated these details into the game (anecdotes and amusing stories initially in there as padding as much as anything else) it became clear that players began to respond very differently to the map, the way in which they talked about the various regions and determined their decisions became more certain, they referred to the regions with greater confidence, and we began to tailor the narrative outcomes of the game to suit the regions more, and gradually the emergent narrative system we were hoping to create was born. I recently read a short guide to creating emergence in Edge magazine. And basically to sum it up its all about variables, the more variables with knock on effects you have the more possibility there is for unpredictable emergence. To use the example of The Agency, the players may not cross a region until they have successfully bribed local authorities to agree to the deforestation, if they chose to pay the bribe, the bribe may or may not succeed, if it succeeds then they may build a road although there is always a chance of strikes, equally once the deforestation ahs happened there are a series of environmental scenarios that can occur, protesters, strikes, landslides which will in turn have repercussions down the line, equally they can chose to not deforest and instead to pursue a more environmentally friendly process, which may in turn win them approval of the relevant regions, but equally may prove problematic if they are chasing rebels or hostage takers who may well hide in the densely forested regions, ect ect ect.
So the large variety of possible scenarios and outcome all influenced by a series of tree like narrative structures, doing one thing can lead to a series of potential other things which in turn can each affect another series of things down the line. The key then is have a lot of things up your sleeve.
Within this increasingly large world of emergent story telling the key was working out where the audience fit into the story with their own interactions. We loved the idea that although the key interactions were clearly prescribed on the various character sheets the players were in fact free to do what they wanted as we then resolved all actions on a series of probability scales and die roles on the fly, adapting the story, and responding to the players. However finding that line where the rules bleed outwards and their edges become porous in allowing the players to enter the world of Tigali and at the opposite where they exist as rigid unbendable parameters for a narrow set of interactions was a semantic balance that we are still adjusting.
In one post-session debrief a player who wished he had realised the freedom that was implicitly offered them said that we should have opened the game by clearly indicating ‘you may do what you want’. This is a big risk that I feel would lead to the ‘monopoly bank robber’ effect, where as a child I grew bored of monopoly God Mode in a computer game where your character can’t die and has unlimited ammunition, in effect destroying the game and although fun to begin with the lack of limitations quickly strips the game of any sense of challenge or achievement. So providing an openness that sits comfortable within the parameters of the game’s world became a question of pacing and embedding a tutorial element into the first two or three turns of the game. After an initial briefing Victoria who has the most direct contact with the players in running the game simply says “your time begins now”. The team then have five minutes to muddle through a first turn occupying themselves with the overall arch goals of the game. In the second turn regardless of the outcome of the first turn we begin to introduce secondary scenarios, as soon as these begin the world of Tigali begins to open up, and this makes the difference between a linear singular objective driven game and the more sprawling open world of The Agency, the fact that the events on the board don’t necessarily correspond to any of the predetermined behaviours is suggestion that all is not as it seems when it comes to choice making in the world of Tigali, rising to the various mini challenges that are presented requires the players to reconsider the relatively narrow palette of interaction initially presented to them and eventually move away from the board, using the phone to communicate with specific characters, use soldiers to to search door to door, convince the diplomat to negotiate with rebels and pirates, leak information to the local news ect…
The game still needs to present a large amount of information to players and present it very clearly and quickly, and this is the next stage of development. Our crucial statistic screen which runs the engine that dictates the state of the country presents the information in a very direct, I dream of projecting irt down onto the country itself creating an interactive map and allowing the players to reamin focussed on the world itself, rather than splitting their point of focus between loking down and inwards at the board and then changing to outwards and up for the stats. This felt like the biggest disconnect in early games, but gradually as the regions in the stats have become richer the connection between these and the areas on the map has become more tangible. One of my personal biggest problems with it at the moment is that regions slip into extinction and this does not necessarily have the immediate effect that I hoped it would. Initially we ran a population statistic in the corner, where the number of souls in Tigali was monitored, however a number of population is a relatively empty exercise until it is contextualised, so next I intend to include a lost souls figure, monitoring growth and decline, and how many people have died during the Agency’s tenure in Tigali. This is largely to force a conversation amongst the players as to their responsibility towards the fictional country. When it comes to choice making within the game there’s often a ‘fuck them’ moment where they decide to sacrifice a dying region or call an airstrike to simply eradicate the pirates rather than negotiate, and often there is at least one voice that stands up in protest, one player was morally offended when another suggested they basically engage in human trafficking to appease some terrorists, and a player in the role of the general when offered the option of ‘village to village search and destroy‘ to find a lost president couldn’t bring himself to order the loss of life. These interactions I think are symptomatic of the game’s biggest success which is world building. The purposefully ‘airy’ rules allow the players a wide palette of interactions and through that a greater freedom to interact with the world of the game.
I am reading the great series of blog post by Adrian Hon over at MSSV about Civilisation and a further expansion of that over at Phillip Trippenbach’s. In Civilization one of the most interesting elements is how the game allows players to generate stories. I believe there is a key difference between a game that tells a story and one that allows a story to be told, and Civilization is particular in allowing space for the player to write their own story onto the largely abstracted epic landscape below them. And there is some of that I think in Tigali, the game itself aims to empower players to affect and participate in the world.
I have been thinking a lot about world building recently, partly as part of this, partly as part of some of the other continuing narratives and mythologies that we are building into our adventure games, and I will expand upon them at a later date, but there is a fascinating difference in world creation in a tactile immersive manner as oppose to the freedom and space allowed by a system such as Civ or to a lesser degree Tigali. As with all best things we have arrived here a bit by accident, if you trace back down on these posts you will see that the early intentions and starting piece for the game were very different, but the call of Tigali was too strong…
As a final appendage we are also re-contextualising the game’s play at the moment rolling it out into non theatrical and game settings, last night it played in an office to a bunch of recruitment consultants and the tone although not radically different shifted enough for it to be notable. The game has changed so radically depending on its setting which I will also touch upon later. But as for a first debrief of The Agency, thanks for playing.
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ben eaton
www.beneaton.org.uk
www.invisiblelflock.co.uk
07813214235
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