On August 12th, I shared 20 of the Un-sticky notes Sharon and I made and wrote about one of them (Everybody Wins) in depth. Let’s take a look and another random selection of 20 Un-sticky Notes..
- Confrontation is not the only kind of interaction
- Change the scope
- Change the scale
- Imagine the box
- End the game
- Stop keeping score
- What did he just say
- Provide small rewards along the way
- Eliminate randomness
- Control for variables
- Fix one thing
- Ask why why why why why (Each “why” after the first is on its own line.)
- Recall the inspiration
- What’s it feel like
- Less exceptions
- Remove a rule
- The narrator is unreliable
- Turn it upside down
- Invert one rule
- Try a different randomizer
Some of these are pretty standard pieces of design advice, like “Confrontation is not the only kind of interaction,” “Provide small rewards along the way,” and, “Less exceptions.” The one I like the most (right now) is, “Imagine the box.” I like it because it’s a jam-breaker. It doesn’t focus on what you’re doing right then and there. Instead, it encourages you to visualize the final product. Doing this helps you picture what your idealized vision of the game will be like, which may reveal aspects of it that you’ve forgotten while bushwhacking your way through probability tables or deck ratio balancing.
I glanced at “What did he just say,” and that gave me an interesting idea. I chose to interpret it as rewarding played for paying attention to what the player before them does. Imagine a game where you have a range of actions available to you (build, move, research, invest, and harvest). Each action costs resources and provides a benefit. Applying “What did he just say“ yields the rule: If you choose the action that the player before you chose, that action costs less (or may even be free).
Can we justify this metaphysically? Can there be a situation where it costs X to do a thing, but if other people do the same thing immediately afterwards, it costs them less than X? Producing in volume works kind of like this: It costs X to produce (say) 500 units, but (1.20 * X) to produce 1,000 units. This is also true if the service provider has to travel to you to offer the service (and passes the travel costs on to you), but is happy to charge other patrons less since the travel costs have already been covered (This implies an interesting game structure and theme…). This is also true if it’s a business where there are significant setup costs (or costs to get the production line running), but it’s easier to produce once the line is active. I’m sure there are other examples, but there’s no need to list all of them. For now, we’ll simply accept that there are several ways to metaphysically justify this mechanic.
What are the consequences of letting following players use a prior action at reduced cost? The obvious one is that the first player to take a desirable action will (unfairly?) bear more of the cost than other players. Also, it’s likely that players will tend to take the same action in clumps. If you choose to build, I’m incented to build, and the player who follows me is also incented to do so. This rule could have the unintended consequence of causing all of the players to play in the exact same (if not very similar) way. A less obvious consequence comes from strategy: I may choose an action that I know you could not afford to take, even at the discounted rate, simply to prevent you from copying my action (and gaining the benefit of the discount).
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced that it’s a fruitful direction to take a game in. I think you’d have to ensure that each player started off with fairly different resources (like the beginning of Settlers of Catan) to ensure that all of the players don’t end up playing the same game.
— Jonathan A Leistiko :: thought : gaming
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