Hot Takes: Documentation
Group members: Gwen Ray, Michelle Park, June Burkle
Artists’ Statement
Hot Takes is a Never Have I Ever style party game designed to be played with friends to get to know them better! The game revolves around players sharing their unpopular opinions or “hot takes” that they think a certain fraction of the group will agree with. After a player gives their hot take on their turn, each member of the group says whether they agree or disagree. At that point there is a debate period of one minute after which a second vote is cast, which determines the final fraction to be used for scoring. One of our main design goals with the game was to make something that is simple and yet enjoyable enough that anyone can play and have a good time with little setup and short acclimation time. This is why we opted for a very simple website that generates random percentages and has a built in timer as a tool for the players. All other “pieces” and game elements are just structured discussions between players and hand raising.
Concept Map
Initial Decisions
As far as formal elements, we knew that there should be multilateral competition between players, and the main objective would be to win the most rounds by knowing how your friends will respond best. In order to easily keep track of gameplay, we wanted as few resources as possible — hand raising, some kind of system to assign percentages, possibly a timer. The “arbitrary obstacles” would refer to the percentage assigned to how many people in the group agree. The boundaries in this case would be any player within the circle playing, but since any observers might also weigh in with their opinions, it could be argued that the boundary of the game extends to them as well. In the initial stages, our rules and outcomes were what were the most debated on, so we tried several tweaked rules and win conditions for playtesting.
Our core values in making the game were that we wanted the main type of fun to be fellowship and we knew that we wanted our game to be as simple and accessible as possible. We actually had several other ideas involving cards and categories assigned, but we realized if we really wanted it to be on the same level of accessibility as Never Have I Ever, it should be the minimal amount of mechanics while still being fun. If we were to playtest further, we could potentially figure out what levels of “expansions” players might also enjoy once they’re used to playing the base version of the game.
Testing and Iteration History
Our first prototype was pretty close to finished in our opinion, so we came to class prepared to playtest. Some of the bigger notes from that were that people disliked the strategic and political element to voting in order to sabotage the person who was giving their hot take. One player commented that the skill of the game should revolve around choosing a good take, not navigating the politics of who has points.
From there, we created another iteration which made the voting system more simultaneous to eliminate some of these problems and fixed the timing of some of the sections to give people more time to consider their own hot take. We also added a discussion section of the game to attempt to add more intrigue surrounding how people would eventually vote.
We found from our feedback on this iteration that we hadn’t allotted enough time for discussion and that it seemed unimportant. We had originally thought of the mechanic being framed as “selling your pitch,” and it seemed like without that explicit language, people felt that there wasn’t enough purpose. Finally, we made our prototype that became our final version, which attempted to minimize the political strategy for gameplay by further emphasizing the purpose of the discussion portion.
Our final playtest went pretty well, and the only comment that the players had was that it was confusing to be going by percentages when there aren’t very many players; it makes the players have to do unnecessary mental math. If we were to build another version, we would have players input the number of people playing and give them a specific number of people to convince.
Final Playtest Recording
Final prototype link
Design Mockups
