Posted on

Experiences That Have Shaped My Thinking: The National Security Decision Making Game

Back in 1994, I went to the Origins game convention, which was in San Jose that year. One of the things I did was to play a game called the National Security Decision Making game, which was a simulation run by a couple of guys who had taught at the Naval War College. It was intended to model, in abstract form, most of the major players in international politics and their important interactions. I was all set to mix it up international relations style. However, upon drawing my role, I got to be a region of the United States.

This was 13 years ago, so I don’t remember the game’s details terribly well. I do, however, remember the basic dynamics of the US’s domestic politics in the game, because that was what I mostly had to deal with. There were, I believe, five regions of the US — New England and the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Plains States, and the West Coast. I was New England. The main objective of the regions was to secure national resources for themselves, in the form of a share of the national budget, which was refigured regularly. A region could accomplish this by lobbying the President, who determined the budget.

There were also three politicians, whose base condition was to be a Senator, but one of whom would be elected President by the regions every so often. I don’t remember the politicians’ names, but let’s call them Senator Gravitas, Senator Unctuous, and Senator Nonentity.

At the beginning of the game, we had a choice to make, and the senators made their pitches. Senator Gravitas seemed intelligent, trustworthy, and possessed of good plans for the nation. Senator Unctuous, meanwhile, mostly seemed ambitious. He said the right things, but his eyes were a little too clearly on the prize, and he just seemed a little sleazy. Senator Nonentity I don’t remember at all; I merely assume he must have existed because I’m pretty sure there were three senators, and we shall not speak of him again. Instead, let us assume he retreated to the ranks of those elder statesmen who are always discussed as potential presidential candidates, and whose chances always seem quite good except for their inability to excite either donors or voters. Needless to say, President Gravitas was elected, and it was morning in America.

The Gravitas administration was probably quite successful; he threw himself into foreign affairs with a will, and things seemed to be mostly going his way. I, however, was not paying that much attention, because I wasn’t allowed into some of the most important stuff, and I was mostly concerned with the fact that my share of the federal budget was not what it could be.  I managed to wheedle some concessions out of the President, but the other regions were pushing hard too, and he had a lot to do.

Shortly before the election rolled around, Senator Unctuous asked if he could have a word with me, the Midwest, and the West Coast. “I have a proposition,” he said. “If you three vote for me, I will give you the entire federal budget.” We were startled. We were a little scandalized. We could do the math. Thus began the Unctuous Administration.

Sen. Gravitas was really pissed off. Here he’d been doing a good job, getting things done, treating everyone fairly, and we had straight up stabbed him in the back. I felt a little bad about it, but I was getting a much bigger slice of the pie, and pie is a wonderful cure for guilt. The South and the Plains States were pretty ticked off too, but there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. Unctuous wasn’t about to throw them a bone, because if he annoyed one of the regions in his coalition enough to lose it, he was going down for good.

I don’t remember how the game went from there; it had been running a long time, it was late, and I think I went to bed before we got through another term. Still, I think about that experience a lot when I think about national politics.

originally published on LiveJournal

Failure Modes in LARP
(July 21, 2005)

I am, in some respects, a grim person. One of these respects is that I tend to respond to the conclusion of a project by introspecting a while on what went wrong. (I try to stay positive, but this generally means an occasional ray of light among the grim. (This is why I never publish my postmortems of anything; they’re depressing. And vulgar.))

Anyway, last weekend I was on staff for a LARP, and I’ve been mulling over places I erred. Out of the internal discussion, I’ve noticed a few distinct types of failure in assembling a LARP. And never one to resist a taxonomy, I share them here.

Failures of Conception: Sometimes, an idea that seems clever just isn’t. Or sometimes there are bits of gameplay that would never have worked, but you didn’t manage to put two and two together. Case in point from the game just past: in game, there were two ways to learn a new skill. You could brew a potion using the alchemy system, generally having to pass through three to four intermediate steps and using up consumable resources. Or you could find a tutor and spend ten minutes getting taught the skill. Individually, both mechanics seemed reasonable. Side by side, I feel like a dope.

Failures of conception are frustrating, because you can’t really explain them away — you screwed up, no two ways about it. At the same time, they’re the easiest to learn from. The error is usually clear, and often you can draw some nice principle to blog about, which is pleasant.

Failures of Implementation: Sometimes bits of gameplay didn’t work because they didn’t work like they were supposed to. You ran out of time, someone else on staff misunderstood the packet, the crucial prop broke, whatever. It didn’t work right. The classic example, in my experience, is the political mechanics for The Bear in Winter, the Victorian steampunk game a crowd of us ran in January of 2004. I got caught up in making really badass maps, ran out the clock, and failed to finish the asset lists. It was basically unplayable. It’s possible that the mechanic would have proven a terrible failure of conception — it was a little avant-garde — but I don’t know; it never got its chance. (To this day, I want to run a game where I can take it for a spin. If you’d like to play in a small-scale experimental diplomatic simulation, bug me about it and maybe that can happen sometime.)

Another example, to my mind, is the combat mechanic from The Camel in Summer (the game from last weekend — yeah, there’s an Animal in Season motif going on there (huh, now I want to run a 1920s expatriates game called Coq au Vin)), which I realize some people feel was a failure of conception. The original idea was an attempt to make hand-to-hand combat, which was not really appropriate to the Arabian Nights bazaar setting, vaguely embarrassing. It was akin to your generic non-boffer LARP combat mechanic, but in place of rock-paper-scissors, we were going to use Rockem Sockem Robots. At the last moment, we couldn’t find Rockem Sockem Robots, and used a travel set of Hungry Hungry Hippos instead. Unfortunately, the table we used didn’t stay level, which made it sort of pointless; Hungry Hungry Hippos is very easy when you have a slope in your favor. It’s possible the mechanic would have been problematic in any event, but we don’t really know; the tilt pretty much spoiled it.

Failures of implementation drive me nuts, because there’s not much you can draw from them other than “shit happens”. They also cause arguments; I get most defensive when someone is critiquing a failure of implementation as if it were a failure of conception. I can’t really defend the gameplay in question — it didn’t work. At the same time, I don’t feel like we can say much useful about it other than on a theoretical level based on what we instinctively feel ought to work, and purely theoretical arguments about LARP are best resolved with nerve gas. (See? Depressing and vulgar. Well, violent, anyway.)

Emergent Failures: Intrinsic to the form, emergent failures happen when the players behave in unanticipated ways that cause gameplay elements to collapse. Arguably, this is a subtype of failures of conception, because in theory you should have been able to anticipate that the behavior at issue might happen, but if you can anticipate everything the players might do, there’s not much point from where I’m sitting in running the game at all.

An example of emergent failure is the underutilization of the alchemy system in The Camel in Summer. Many of the potions you could make affected the combat system — healing, powerups, etc. The dysfunction of the combat system, therefore, meant there was no demand for a lot of what you could do with alchemy.

Emergent failures are one of the things that I realize really aggravate me about the essentially interactive-literature-style games we’ve been running. I used to run boffer games, with large staffs and an essentially players-vs.-staff narrative structure. When things went wrong in unexpected ways, it was possible to roll with it. The biggest game I ran, a weekend-long piece called Mysteries of the Sunken Hundred, went horribly awry on the second day. The players had failed badly at one plot thread, and were basically unwilling to do what had to be done to avoid catastrophe. So my co-GM and I sat down (after cursing a bit), brainstormed a few minutes, and drafted an entire new slab of gameplay to get the game back on track. We slotted it in, and none of the players ever realized we hadn’t meant to do it that way from the get-go. I can’t do that in an IL game. I don’t have the staff to make more than subtle changes to the flow of the game, and even if I did, the PvP narrative structure of the style makes it hard to help one player out of a hole they’ve gotten into without possibly screwing over another player.

Failures of Aesthetic: I almost hesitate to put this last category in, but I’ve seen (be honest; I’ve done) things that made the players absolutely miserable, but worked *exactly* the way the GM intended them to. I hesitate because I think the first three categories are more or less objective, while this one depends on the common but not universal proposition that if a player didn’t have fun, that is by definition a gameplay failure. Now, there are certainly times when players create their own unfun, but I find it useful to distinguish between gameplay that didn’t work and gameplay that did work but wasn’t fun. Case in point: I wrote a game once where the entire player group was killed by fiat halfway through and spent the rest of the game on the run from the spirits who collect the dead. There were a few players who felt, either in or out of character, that all good people ought to embrace their eternal reward, and were pretty upset about the whole thing. I think, on the whole, the conceit was worth it, but I still consider it a failure in part for that reason.

Posted on

Lessons in Game Design: Deter behavior by making it unfun

I was part of a team that ran a LARP this weekend. There were certain types of action that we thought were undesirable for the style of game we were trying for, so we just didn’t provide a way to do them. This works in a board game, but when a roleplayer wants to do something that the rules do not provide for, it is frustrating and no one knows quite what to do.

What I wish we had done is provided a way to resolve the activity in question, but in as un-fun a way as possible. Players often want to do impossible things, but dull things usually get a pass. This was why my Vampire LARP, back in the day, used Mind’s Eye Theatre despite its many flaws: combat was so dragged-out and unpleasant that it was an effective deterrent for combat in any situation that didn’t absolutely demand it. It was, however, available when necessary.

I see two ways to go about designing a prohibitively unfun system.  First, you could make it baroque and awful, as in the Mind’s Eye Theatre example above.  Second, you could make it trivial and boring: e.g., “flip a coin; whoever wins, wins” or, in some cases, “go sit out the next half-hour of the game and then the GM will make a call.”  (Which I guess is sort of like the MET option but with less bookkeeping.)

I suspect baroqueness might be the right choice for activities that would be seem thematically appropriate (and thus characters might reasonably have relevant abilities) but undesirable for the particular game, and triviality the way to go for actions that lie further outside the game’s focus.

No doubt when I try this in the future I’ll find the downside of the approach, but right now it looks pretty solid.

Originally published on LiveJournal