With XDS fresh on our minds, we in the Gaming Studio were so pleased to see our own Patricio Spallati onstage there. We heard about his experience in the past year co-producing (with EA) the latest versions of UFC. So many good insights. Keep an eye out for his post this week. In light of the upcoming summit, I thought it’d be a good time to finish the game design post I started a few weeks ago. In a previous post, I started explaining the Core, Focus, Power methodology I use in designing games. There I focused on the first two aspects, Core and Focus. Here, I’ll pick up where I left off: Power. Hopefully it helps further your understanding of the complex decision-making involved in game design. Giving it power Robert Abbott is a programmer who, as a hobby, enjoys designing clever games with poker decks. One of them, called Babel, involves each player getting ten poker cards and then inviting them to play two hands of five cards or a hand of ten. The hands are the same you’d find in poker (full house, straight, flush, etc). Depending on the hand they’ve got, they’ll get a higher or lower score. Once a player manages to play the necessary hands, they go up to the judge, who takes the cards, tallies the points and deals out new random cards. How do they get the cards they need? They bargain. There are no constraints, they just have to bargain with one another. You end up with a bunch of people running around, yelling at the top of their lungs for cards they’re missing and offering up those they don’t need anymore. Robert Abbott designed this game after visiting Wall Street and watching the traders shouting and dealing at high speed and in the middle of the chaos. He thought it was rather a playful situation, and he aimed to recreate it by designing a game. Babel’s Core = To recreate, through a board game, the feeling of being a part of Wall Street Having defined the Core, he started designing, always keeping his ideas and his features Focused towards the Core. He designed a game for three to six players, with no set turns, where the main activity was trading, and with certain numeric rules that defined scoring, etc. Focus = No turns, trading But the game, even when it was alright from a theoretical point of view (a clear Core, a Focused design) didn’t manage to create the messy and chaotic experience that he had hoped for. It was then that Babel got the full treatment. He gave it Power: Robert designed a set of rules that allows the game to be played by as many people as possible. If you’ve got a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people in a room, they can all play the game, turning it into an experience that’s massive, out of control, and powerful. Power = Rules that allow it to become massive That decision, taking the idea one step further, is what I call “Power.” Games and their makers featured at XDS really get this concept clearly. The two previous steps (defining the Core and Focusing on it) are […]
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