New characters and new groups of players

Now i realise that i've never really debriefed our ICA play of The Agency in a meaningful way, but things have been busy busy busy.

Be that as it may we're going back down to London on the 10th of July to play it again.

It went great last time, there was loads we liked and the overall core experience of the game works.

Six players played the game at the table  in a brilliant combination of team co-operation, and players choosing to sacrifice their personal goals for the greater good of the country, as well as Diplomat who spent most of the game making back room deals on the in-game phone and ended up pulling off a coup on the last day of the game.

great stuff!

The other thing was the interaction from the 'audience' players.

Originally they were conceived of as a separate team of their own who spent the time rolling die and generally making the background stuff happening.  This worked and was part of the whole "hiding the mechanics' part of the piece, but also didn't work as a straight experience for those players, so at the last minute we changed it all up a bit and instead invited people who didn't get to play the around the table could come  and watch the proceedings and were invited to intervene and come and help with some of the game resolution mechanics as well as help form the plot and scenarios in the game.

And people did.  there was some great interaction and audience members returning over the 90 minutes the game took to see where Tigali was at what they could input now.

We really enjoyed this, partly because it adds a whole element of unpredictability which we love into the game experience.  Everything is still determined on a set of statistics and dice rolls, there is no 'playing god' but the nature of the input and some of the consequences that external audience members come up with in return for the choices the characters are making are different from our own, and it also begins to transform the piece into this game engine over which we have increasingly less control as we gradually cede it all over to players and audience..

So for the next incarnation of The Agency we are going to open the idea up even more, audiences will now be able to watch and join in the game from anywhere in the world on the internet. We're building a webpage that will host a live feed of the game being played and a live twitter feed through which anyone will be able to interact with the live game on the ground.  i will post more details on this as we figure out the parameters of it all, but you can check back here or follow @the_agency_live which will be the feed's twitter id.  This will allow not just for a remote audience to play but for those players to be bel to keep up with the action as well as how their idea played out if it makes it to the board.

today we've begun to redraft, changed some of the game balance to bring out some elements more and crucially we have lost a character and replaced him with another.

The Architect is now gone and instead is replaced with an Emergency Response Team.

The ERT operatives can deliver fast and short term aid solutions to regions of Tigali which are under threat.  The presence of a ERT unit improves a region's general health, meaning that getting a unit in can help to stabilize or even save a region on the brink of disaster.  We have also built in a new Airdrop move for ERT units meaning they can be moved faster and more cheaply.  This increases the speed in which the team can deploy these units around the map, but also only provides a short term solution, and training new ERT units is very expensive, and as ever taking a flight anywhere in Tigali has a 1/6 chance of crashing due to freak weather conditions... We hope the new character is going to spice things up a bit more, the Architect who was in previously felt a bit 'more of the same', a character whose role was only really self serving and was a hangover from when we wanted the Architect to build townships for population control, this means that we have also removed a whole victory condition, which was a bit flabby anyway, and instead created a much more exciting character with t a bit of variety.

A lot of that will make very little sense if you have not played the game yet, but good news the Arts Council have kindly granted us a small pot of money to develop the piece so it will about over the next couple of months.  

The game is exciting and quite tense, and has got players interacting with each other in ways we never really expected, and we're going to be developing that further both for the physical experience and the online element, so please stay in touch. 

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test play and what are we representing?

tonight we had our first playtest of the Agency with a bunch of kind people who have never played the game before.

and i'm glad to say it went well, there was plenty wrong with it, and we didn't finish a game rather played through two hours and got a sense of what we needed to tuck and nip and change up to make the whole thing the experience we wanted.

There's lots of boring nuts and bolts stuff, and a lot to do with levels of clarity and intuitive decision making that we need to improve on.  The biggest thing at the moment is the pace and the feedback to the players controlling the 'fates', the games of chance that determine the events in play and the result of the actions that the players chose to undertake on the map.  We're going to make some pretty drastic changes on that front, letting it be largely performance led although still determined as a result of random event generators and dice rolls.

Players tonight thought the vents were scripted, which is good, because they weren't but the random generators and dice rolls were creating a chain of events  that hung together cohesively as a narrative, and ended up empowering the players, who said that they felt that they had 'power'.  Which was what we were hoping for: a strong sense of action and consequence, but most importantly consequences and actions that matter in the context of the world.

I thought a lot about actions that mean something, we talk a lot about oil in our game, and there are downsides to having an economy reliant on oil, one being that the potential damage when oil spills happen is quite large.  This has obvious real world parallels.  It s late and i  won't dwell on this too long but i have long been obsessed with ideas of representation and iconography, and the language, especially the visual language, that we use to represent events and people.  A lot of this has to do with the stories we tell ourselves and each other about things and moments that have happened, big and small and how we use representation within these narratives.  This seems to be particularly relevant with the rise of all sorts of fundamentalisms the world over.  Particularly the rise of the conservative Christian Right in America, who are rewriting the narratives of evolution and most recently slavery.  By retelling the narrative of slavery and writing out some of its major players and most importantly emancipators is an aggressive use of representation to rewrite truth and in the process our history.

Stories and games are two very different things, many will say that the two are mutually exclusive.  Any of you who read these pages of mine will know that i am not one of those, i believe that narrative and story are compatible, and mutually inclusive on both a meta level and an active level of participation.  Those who don't see it are looking at narratives in the wrong way.

I found this on a blog i follow:

"So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way that no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. ... I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough."

-Tom Bissell, from his book
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

 The game as a lens through which to see ourselves.  We talk about this a lot in performance and theatre, the performer presenting him/herself live on stage, in moments of disappearance that at a deep ontological level are fundamentally about the audience members themselves, all acts of performance are live moments in which the audience contemplate their own mortality.  I have got to this place in my practice ironically out of what i see as the  relative impotence of theatre in interaction and in creating meaning through this without positing the performer in a position of heightened idolatry as either sacrificial body or holy untouchable.  So whereas Tom Bissel is writing about video games, i would venture that in games that are collaborative practices of play the game points not just at the one person who is playing but al of them, and points back and forth because games and players are about what you do, they are fundamentally active forms, that point and repoint and repoint each time from a different perspective and position.

So what does this have to do with representation?  Well perhaps at the heart of all of these is how we represent ourselves.  So as we make a game about a humanitarian crisis (although with a darkly comic edge) are we in fact tasking the audience to consider themselves, how they react together and how they are co-represented in the context of the in-game events.

Players tonight all played with a different focus, all were immersed in the world of the game, but some were trying to push their own personal victory, others were so caught up in the greater good they forgot entirely about their individual goals and focussed instead on the island as a whole.  I'm not sure what it says about them all as individuals but it says something.

So we have created a world that works, and one in which the players want to spend some time, we now need to find who they are in it and most importantly who they can become in it over the space of 120 mins as groups and also as individuals.

look out for photos tomorrow 

and a live stream from the ICA

B.

x

     

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Rules rule

its true, they pretty much do in games.  Rules also scare me a little bit, i like the freeform-ness of open play, the messiness of the meandering worlds we've created up until now, the idea of being firm abut what a player can and can't do, and having to stick to that is the most intimidating part of making a game, for me at least.  

These rules are wrapped so tightly in the theme and narrative of the world, so as to hopefully become obvious, and be absolutely intuitive actions that the players expect to undertake as their characters.  So in that sense they're becoming quite easy to get down onto paper, and also the more i tinker and build and finesse them more it becomes crucial for me to stop layering and layering mechanics and remember that crucial to this whole event is the experience itself.

When thinking about them it occurred to me that the addition of the group pot of money in the middle (a suitcase full of cash) has now become the prevalent mechanic of the game, in a world where everything costs money and there's lots to solve what are you going to chose to do, and who will convince the others that they need the money the most... sort of like that reality TV show the Bunker, only with a satirical third world theme and no real money.  But unexpectedly the game has become a game of economic bartering and fast paced negotiation, whereas it previously in my mind at least owed more to an old Avalon Hill board game.  I like this new flavor, mainly because it emerged organically out of conversations between Victoria and myself, and out of the lack of a successful resource mechanic in the game.  And after all money is everything, especially in the third world.  In this version the money is only being spent on the Agency's operations, but in a future iteration i would like a way for the money to flow through everything, and increase the possibility for inter agency corruption, but let's focus on a first rule set then dream up a second one.

look out for a first draft here

B.

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engine-ering live play

just short notes today, 

today has been mostly spent cowering from the sun building and tweaking the central game engine that i'm building in Isadora.  Game engines is a term usually used to describe the inner workings of a computer game's program, the central bit of code that churns through all the data and turns it into graphics and ingame physics ect..

well the Agency has no graphics and physics in that sense although there are plenty of graphs and statistics, but the engine that i'm building is intended to churn through all of the game data as it happens, keeping track of the world's statistics and most importantly the effects that these stats have on the game.

This has become both practical and process for me.  Stripping away all of the procedural stuff (dice rolling checking charts ect..) and replacing it instead with what we hope are a series of intuitive choices and actions means that all of that needs to be replaced with something, and the engine is going to be taking care of all of it for us, driving the narrative forward.  I'm using Isadora to build it, software that i don't normally use for this sort of task, that i normally use to build interactive video environments, however here it's churning through maths equations and spitting them out as graphs and numbers for the players to be able to immediately understand what is happening inside the map (on the ground) so the visual layout of the information is key as well as what information is made public and what remains hidden as 'cogs and wheels'.  That last part is the process part, by having to build the engine and the decide what data to pass through it, patching all the paths and routes together i am making creative decisions as to the feel and depth of the experience, as well as the precise level of feedback the players will receive for their actions. At what point does a box begin to glow red as its population level reaches a dangerous low? how fast do the graph columns rise or sink? how many decimal points do i use to give the players a feel of the depth of their choices but without overwhelming them?  All of these decisions are central to the design, because although they may not alter the mechanics of play they will have a huge bearing on the live experience and the player's ability to interact with each other and the data intuitively (remember the ipad advert: "you already know how to use it"). 

Well the engine will be presentable tomorrow so i will post photos of the interface and perhaps some examples of it working.  Eventually i may make the patch available if people want to dig around in it. below are some photos if you're into that sort of thing, the central patch is made up almost entirely of custom user-made-actors and other custom actors nested in others as there's a lot of data being handled in 16 separate instances and a lot of repeated maths and triggering.

more on the design and feel of the game as well as less techy stuff soon, promise

B.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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game engine

quick shot of our game engine taking shape in Isadora to keep track of live stats ect...

B.

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hide the maths

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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some reference and inspiration images

these are some pictures and visual elements that are going around in my head at the moment, either as inspiration or actual elements i want to try an implement in terms of their texture and feel.

i'm not going to explain them all here as hopefully their significance will become clear as the process evolves.

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these are for starters

B.

ben eaton

www.beneaton.org.uk
07813214235

Posted via email from invisibleflock's making games diary