The Goose [Re]Game
HCIL faculty Caro Williams-Pierce shares how she re-designed the delightfully absurd game in analog form.
I rebuilt the brilliant Untitled Goose Game into an analog multiplayer game for the students in my Games as Emergent Experiences class. One glorious day, they ran around, stole things, and squawked at each other, and my two design goals were achieved: my students all got a sense of the delightful absurdity of the original game, and I laughed really hard. So yeah, if you have nine people, two hula hoops, and a need for giggling, give this version a shot!
DESIGN GOAL: to adapt the Untitled Goose Game into a multiplayer analog game that kept some of the quirky eccentricities of the original game, and caused the same spontaneous belly-laughing.
PEOPLE: you need nine people to play, divided randomly into three groups: Team Boom, Team Sling, and Non-Player Characters (NPCs).
MATERIALS: Most materials can be modified based upon what you’ve got on hand — except the two hula hoops! Those are required.
You will also need two pairs of matching items and one unique item. For the pairs, we used two beach balls and two textbooks, I believe, and the unique item might have been a scarf. The items can really be anything, as long as a person can carry it somehow without using their hands (because their hands are holding hula hoops, naturally!).
Lastly, you’ll need the materials to place down some markers to make the ‘game board.’ You could use cardboard boxes, masking tape on the floor, chalk outlines on the grass, or anything else you have on hand.
SPACE: you need an open space, inside or outside, that’s big enough to have nine people wandering around without constantly bumping into each other. Also make sure that it’s okay to be loud — don’t try this game in a quiet study space!
Use your materials to set up the game board, marking nests and putting down the five items in no particular order:
Actually tracing out the triangle is optional, as the NPCs will enact that shape according to their ‘programming’ — so yeah, up to you!
WIN STATES:
Team Boom or Team Sling can win by getting one of each type of item in their nest. NPCs have no win state — which makes sense, because they’re up against geese, and we all know there’s no winning against those sneaky, tricky, squawky little punks!
GAMEPLAY:
First, NPCs: each of the three NPCs gets a card with their actions and interactions listed in detail. I arbitrarily named my NPCs after colors, because why not? NPC Blue received this card:
Blue walks back and forth across the top of the triangle, and if they come across a place where an item should be, they execute a ‘searching path’ to the bottom right of the triangle, then to the nests. If the item is in the nest, they take it back to its place.
If they are meandering or searching, and they run into another NPC, they shake hands and mumble to each other. If they run into a Goose, they grumble and hrmph — if that Goose has an item, they start following them around, muttering sotto voce.
And if a Goose honks at them, the NPC jumps, yelps, and drops any item they happen to be carrying. Naturally.
Purple and Green have the same interactions, but their walking and searching paths are different:
The goal with the NPC design was to have each just trying to go about their normal day, just as in the original game. (Poor NPCs — whether digital or analog, they are doomed to be constantly interrupted by the dratted geese!)
Now, Team Boom and Team Sling:
Each team gets a team card that explains their goal (win state) — as each team has the same win state, member roles, actions, and interactions, I’ll just use Team Sling cards to illustrate below.
The Welcome to Team Sling! card describes the overall goal. Then each member gets one of three cards that determines their role as Sling Goose, Sling Squawk, or Sling Pick. As a multiplayer game, I wanted the team members to have to collaborate to be the Goose together. So I broke down the Goose into those three parts: Sling Goose walks around trying to steal items, but they are told when to steal an item by Sling Pick, and when to scare an NPC by Sling Squawk.
In other words, they are the executor of those commands, but the only part they actually control is where to walk — they have to wait for an order from their teammates to pick up an item or squawk.
(This is why the game is so amazingly fun — errr, loud — Sling Pick and Sling Squawk have to stay near the nest, so they’re hollering SLING PICK SLING SQUAWK SLING SQUAWK loudly across the game board to their Goose.)
The details of each role is listed on the card below — you’ll notice that this is where Sling Goose learns that they have to wear a hula hoop the whole time! I built the hula hoop in as a way to prevent players from using their hands to hold an item — that would be inappropriately un-goose-like behavior!
There are a variety of ways to modify this. For example, I had a unique item, which meant that the two teams were always squabbling over it! Using another pair would have changed those dynamics quite a bit. And some NPCs walk by item spaces more often than others, which means they tend up executing more search paths.
Sadly, I’ve only played this once in class before the pandemic shut us down, but the result was delightful! My students were loud and silly, yelling and honking and tucking beach balls under their chin. Neither Boom nor Sling managed to get the three different items in their nest at the same time, so I suppose that there is an NPC win state: don’t let the Goose win!
That’s my Goose [Re]Game story! At the time, I had to be careful about which games I assigned to students each week — my little Game Lab was just getting set up, so each student had to buy each individual game and have a way to play it. Needless to say, I aimed for free or cheap multi-platform games! And of course, the very day that I opened up the Game Lab was the same day that our campus was shut down for the following year and a half. (If anyone wants to donate a PS5 to the Game Lab, I’d be eternally grateful! The PS4 looks way less exciting and impressive now than it did when I bought it…)
Lastly, I want to share this image:
This board was what greeted myself and my Youth eXperience lab colleagues on our rare visits back to campus throughout the pandemic. Every time, it reminded me how much I missed in-person classes — which was sad, yes, but also reminded me what we were aiming for in staying safe and alive. Now, we’re back (fully masked and vaxxed), and I’m deeply grateful. Yes, I have to learn how to identify students just from their forehead; but also yes, learning together is way better than learning apart.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Attribution must include a link to this work.
