Show017: Game Design for Game Designers with James Brown
Here is the first of my Gen Con interviews. I had scheduled to record with James Brown, designer of Death’s Door, Brick Battles, and Blood and Bronze, on Wednesday night. We couldn’t find anywhere to record, so we did a commando recording in the lobby of my hotel. It gave me a chance to use my new omnidirectional microphones and doesn’t sound as bad as I imagined.
James and I discussed Game design, starting with some questions you should be able to answer:
- What is your game about?
- How is your game about that?
- What behaviors does it encourage or reward to achieve that?
- What do the players do?
- What do the characters do?
- What is fun to you and why do you want to play this game?
- Who do you want to play the game?
We then talk about the elevator pitch, and that you need to consider how art, text, and everything else you do expresses the games mission. Then we discuss various elements of Game Design.
- The reward system: Is a feedback loop that can have positive or negative reinforcement. It’s a way to get players to engage a mechanic or behavior that you want to encourage.
- A positive example; fan Mail in Prime time Adventures.
- A negative example; the loser keeping the token in Death’s Door.
- The social dynamic
- Currency: What the game rules give the players and GM to interact with the fiction.
- In a lot of storygames this will be dice.
- Can also be statistics on the character sheet. For instance Strength in D+D defines how the character can interact with the environment like doors, weapons, armor, etc.
- Fortune, Drama, and Karma.
- Fortune is using some element of chance in the resolution.
- Karma compares things and then the result is generated.
- Drama
- Escalation
- Player interaction
- I’ll be there for you.
- Nobody gets Hurt.
- I’ll be there for you.
This isn’t quite finished yet, but I need to take a nap and go to work.
5:20 pm on August 24th, 2007
Wow, I don’t sound nearly as stoned and half-asleep as I feared I would, although I do still mumble and drag a lot. And I completely got sidetracked from talking about the bigger cycle of reward systems, which is the real meat of the topic. Next time, Gadget!
James
7:19 pm on August 24th, 2007
You did say aboot though. *grins*
I’m still making the post and can expand on that section. What do you think you missed?
9:26 am on November 18th, 2007
I thought this episode was fantastic in pretty much every way. Death’s Door sounds like an amazing game - I felt myself in both categories at once - I need to play this game/I can’t play this game.
It actually reminded me of Julia Ellingboe’s Steal Away Jordan, in that it is a game about something uncomfortable, created for the purpose of dealing with that very thing. Its a game about more than the game, which I think is potentially pretty powerful.
I also appreciated all of the discussion that occurred in the episode about games in general. It gave me a lot to think aboot
as well as some ‘live’ examples of game theory that clarified some of it for me.
So yeah, anyway, I really enjoyed it.
12:46 pm on November 18th, 2007
Hey Doug,
I’m glad you enjoyed it. If you remember what got clarified for you specifically?
9:59 pm on November 18th, 2007
Currency, specifically, because I never really thought of it as such a broad category. I had more of an idea that it included the things that you ’spend’ in a game system at the table - for example, going “all in” in Mortal Coil, or how you allocate tokens each round for conflicts, etc. I didn’t see it as broadly as ‘how you interact with the game environment’.
The discussion of the reward system didn’t so much clarify anything because I think I already have a pretty good grasp of it, but it was helpful in my own thinking and design. I’ve found myself adding reward systems to game systems because its worked out so well running one-shot games at the local game store. Especially handing out little ‘fiddly bits’ to reinforce the kind of behaviors I want to reinforce, and getting the players to do that for each other as well. It really worked well in a Call of Cthulhu game, for example, when it isn’t part of the actual system at all. My friend’s BESM game has a whole token system built onto the system that is also working out really well, encouraging everyone to make the game more fun and to have more buy-in.
I also really liked the two principles of player interaction - ‘I’ll be there for you’ and ‘Nobody gets hurt’. An almost poignant way to spell out the way we want to treat each other in a game, especially games dealing with difficult issues - which is a direction I like to go in games at least some of the time.