What does it mean to call yourself a game designer? Much like being an artist, it is a creative practice that anyone can enter into and for the exceptionally hard working and lucky- a profession. This weekend I was fortunate enough to hang with all kinds of designers, folks who live and breathe games and are pursuing it as a career at Hexacon Denver , the fresh faced newbie kid designers at the Riverside Library and the knucklehead teen gamers who hang in my dining room, mooching snacks and coming up with the best tabletop house rules ever. The range of players and their experiences was truly, all over the board and yet there were some fundamental commonalities. We laughed all weekend, in each game situation I encountered players and designers fully immersed themselves in the projects, reaffirming my belief that narrative is the key element.
Though they were my youngest game friends, the kids at the library may have impressed me the most- taking a huge amount of new, complicated information and concepts and distilling it down to unique and playable prototypes in under two hours. Rather than a lecture style, I’ve formatted this workshop into a brief introduction then separated the materials they have to work with into zones; avatars, playscapes, mechanics and resources explaining how these items can be utilized in the design process.
Our mantra for the afternoon…Games are stories with rules…I asked the kids, what things do we need to write a book or story? “A plot, setting, characters, adjectives” BOOM! these kids were ready with all the answers, their teachers should be proud. My big question to them was, “what story do you want to tell? what world do you want to build?”
We started our materials tour with playscapes, did they want to build their game in a discarded book, on a map, use a paper punch to cut hex tiles, use wooden grid? Having a lot of environments to choose from here really helps the kids visualize games beyond a traditional roll and move format which tends to be their default design when given nothing more than blank paper. The same goes for avatars, I bring in all kinds of plastic animals, action figures, cars, tanks, zombies as well as traditional tokens for them to choose from as well as plastic stands to hold characters that they’ve drawn. We talked more about readers of books identifying with the protagonist and in games each player being an individual protagonist. Though we share a plot, our experience of a game will be unique to each of us, we might not win, we might try to kill off another character, as we play, our stories stand alone enriching the larger narrative arc.
Dice, spinners, timers, blank cards and other toys were in the placed in the “mechanics” zone. As we explored these items I asked the kids to think about how they might utilize these tools to either enforce and define the rules or introduce chaos and randomness. This was also where we talked about concepts of balancing strategy, agency and chance. Finally we looked at our resources, to no one’s surprise, the kids were most excited to use money and treasure. I’ve some guesses about this, partially the endorphin rush of winning money but also I think because kids have only rare opportunities to earn real money in their lives at their age, this is a popular imaginary reward. There were also lots of tiles, map parts, tokens, beads and other toys here and we were able to talk about resource management and worker placement.
While this all might be a lot to digest, the kids were eager to jump in and were quickly able to identify what materials they wanted to use and art supplies to bring this vision to life. Polling the room, everyone had an identifiable goal for game and process for the players to get there. By the end of our session there were two treasure hunt games with dragons and rare gems, a path building game of dice rolls and dominoes with horses, jet fights over Australia, Zombies vs. Tanks and a straight up strategy game of token and dice fights.
Working with kids on projects is always refreshing, they are less hesitant to break rules or come up with entirely new systems to work in than my adult friends, imaginative play for them is intrinsic and accessible. For my own games, having some parameters to design around is the thing I need to get the spark going- The 1924 Game Jam is exactly the kind of project I like to noodle around with- The challenge is to design a game based on an artistic work from 1924 that has come into the public domain and can be re-mixed licence free into something new. There was a lot of great subject matter to choose from Puccini’s Turnadot, Tarzan and the Ant Men, Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”, but I decided on Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game- which I’m guessing will be a very popular theme. In the story, hunters are hunting each other on an island of exotic wildlife, man being the most dangerous predator. Since Thanksgiving I’d already given myself the challenge of making a basic roll and move game that didn’t suck on a mosaic tile board so these concepts have been working well together.
My game board is the familiar 64 chess or checkerboard grid with two headed snakes similar to a snakes and ladders game. The object of this two to four player game is to get your hunter and one of your three hounds to safety first taking snakes for shortcuts (or penalties). My twist on the traditional dynamic is having each player move from the bottom of the grid to the top from where they are sitting, in a two player game, you are moving in the opposite direction from the person you are facing as you would in Chinese Checkers- this makes the mid and end portion of the game especially fun especially in a 3 and 4 player game since players will all have different levels of risk and rewards attached to their individual movement and attacks can come from all sides. The neighborhood teens are super into this game right now, which is hilarious as we have a huge library of things for them to choose from. In my game if you land on an occupied space you and the defending player roll a single dice and win goes to the attacker in the case of a tie. Neighborhood hoodlums however have house rule of consenting challenges to break ties, this could be arm wrestling, staring contest, hacky sack trick, bloody knuckles. While I hadn’t intended to add physical these physical elements, the folks I talked to at Hexacon suggested having an alternate rules section, especially if fun ones is a great idea.
Ending my weekend at the game con and test playing my own design was the perfect way to bookend these creative projects- visiting with other late night gamers and getting their advice was welcome affirmation to see myself as not just an educator but game designer.