Courtroom Corruption: A Systems Game of Cards and Corrupt Officials (P3)

Fiona

Published in

Serious Games: 377G

10 min readMar 3, 2020

by Samantha Koire, Natália Mazotte, Eli Vazquez, Nylah DePass, and Fiona

Artists’ Statement

Courtroom Corruption is a game that models how special interests can influence judicial decisions and have lasting impact on the justice system through the setting of legal precedents. Two lawyers compete to win cases and gain influence in order to end the game with the most money.

Each game consists of three trials, which are each made up of three rounds wherein evidence is revealed and potentially tampered with, fraud is investigated, and lawyers negotiate with the judge. Between each of the three trials, the player acting as the judge may change depending on how the players’ reputations and earnings change. However, any precedents that have been set by previous cases must be abided by. Lawyers must decide how to win their cases (either honestly or without getting caught being corrupt) or maintain their judge-ship so that they can end the game with the most money.

Ideally, after playing Courtroom, players will be more likely to think critically about potential corrupting influences in our judicial system. Specifically, they’ll be more aware of the factors outside of pure consideration of evidence and precedent that can have a lasting influence on court proceedings. (Of course, we aren’t claiming . . . and certainly aren’t hoping . . . that the level of corruption present in our game is reflective of a typical courtroom!).

Concept Map

The concept map pictured below illustrates the game mechanics and relationships. All players vie for money and reputation. Lawyers try to improve their chances at winning at trials by finding evidence, revealing tampering and other corrupt acts by the other players, and negotiating with the judge. The judge has power to decide if they will act on special interests, accept any bribes, or damage their reputation to alter the evidence precedence. This game follows our mental model of courtrooms: lawyers present their evidence, any evidence deemed faulty gets thrown out, and the judge makes a ruling. Throughout this process, the public forms an opinion about the case and any precedents set carry through to future court cases. Depending on performance, lawyers can be promoted or demoted.

Other Models

In our early brainstorm, one idea that emerged was a game totally designed around negotiation skills. Players would have different types of evidence at different costs and could choose to play competitively or cooperatively.

In competitive mode, they would try to take as much advantage as possible by buying the lowest cost evidence on their decks, leaving the most expensive evidence for the opponent. In cooperative mode, they would try to find the common denominator (or the optimal cost) of each piece of evidence on their respective decks, gathering a greater number of evidence at a lower cost. The game conflict would be centered on the prisoner’s dilemma: if the two players decide to act in their own self-interests they won’t produce the optimal outcome.

Our discussion evolved to incorporate a more systemic view of a court trial and a bigger progression of consequential actions in the core loop of the game.

Formal Elements & Values

Courtroom is a game designed for three players: two lawyers and one judge. The system requires all the roles to be filled and all the players are competing against each other — although in some cases two players must actually cooperate against the third to have a chance of winning. The boundaries are the game mat and, since the game involves a live negotiation between players, the room in which the game is played.

The objective is to receive as much money as possible during the trials, either by winning the trials honestly or acting corruptly(as a forbidden act).

In order to achieve the objective, players need to follow a progression of actions in the preparation phase and resolve these actions in the trial phase. We decided to keep our game core loop in the preparation phase, which consists of 3 rounds with the same procedures. When we were defining the first rules for our game, one main concern was to craft a core loop in a way that players could quickly understand and follow. Since a system game can become extremely complex, we decided to set some constraints such as the number of rounds and actions in each phase.

The main resources consist of money and reputation tokens. There are also some resources specifically designed for each role: lawyers have Evidence Cards deck while judge has a Special Interests Deck.

The conflict in Courtroom emerges from the strategic evaluation of the cost-benefit of ethical decisions. Since special interests can be investigated, resulting in a loss of reputation, it’s a risky step for the judge to play them. And the same applies to the lawyers choosing to tamper or bribe. Bribing the judge can cost lawyers a lot of money without any guarantee that the trial outcome will be positive for them, especially if the evidence (and therefore public opinion) is not on their side.

It is precisely from this type of conflict that the values at stake come out. The game aims to spark a critical view of judicial proceedings and legal corruption, giving the players a general idea of how court works and how consequential their choices in a trial can be.

Testing/Iteration:

We first conceived of Courtroom based on the prompts: “Chess,” “Materialism,” and “Honesty. ” Our brainstorm surrounding these concepts immediately suggested something surrounding a court, and “Honesty” suggested a game with hidden information, where players would have to decide when to trust each other and when to prevaricate.

Early Playtesting:

The players for our initial playtest were Sami, Nylah and Natalia. We played through one trial based on a preliminary rule-set which suggested 5 trials, each consisting of 5 rounds. This original version of the rules differed from the final version (linked to at the bottom of this article) in that players had to choose either to discover evidence or to tamper with their opponent’s (or give the appearance of tampering by playing a blank card). Player’s could also “market” to improve their reputation (a mechanic which is discussed further in our second iteration) or investigate/reveal opponents’ cards (a mechanic which remains largely unchanged in our final version). This version of the rules was complicated by the fact that tampering with evidence had a monetary cost (as well as a potential reputation cost), something that players had to keep track of secretly. While the Negotiation Phase remains largely unchanged in our final version of the rules, we immediately encountered a timing issue: it was obvious based on the time lawyers spent in discussion with the judge whether they had chosen to bribe or not. This is mitigated in our final version by our suggestion that players take the time to discuss future strategy, as well as by the fact that as players gain experience with the game they can learn to manipulate this source of information.

The major issues with the first iteration of Courtroom were the complicated nature of its central mechanics (especially paying for things secretly) as well as the general denseness of the rules. The importance of evidence and precedence — major components in the values we hope to impart when considering Courtroom as a serious game — were minimal, and we could not explore them fully given that playing only one trial took our entire testing time. There were also major balance issues between the lawyers and judge.

Playtesting the Second Iteration:

After seeing how long our first playtest took just to get through one trial, we decided to reduce the number of rounds in a trial from 5 to 3. To compensate for this change, we made it so that lawyers could take more action on their turn. We took all of the possible actions from the first version of the game and let the lawyers each take up to 3 of those actions on their turn. We also hoped that this “pick 3” system would streamline the player turn and make the trial progress smoother.

Based on the disruption caused to game-flow by players needing to leave the room for the negotiation round, we attempted an edit where negotiating players would whisper to each-other instead, however this was uncomfortable and provided too much opportunity for them to be overheard. We also extensively discussed the possibility of alternatives such as miming while the other player closed their eyes or writing down bribes or using pre-marked cards and passing them in envelopes. However our entire team, as well as many of our playtesters, expressed enjoyment of the social element of the negotiation round and we felt a large part of the Fellowship-type fun in Courtroom would be lost if we switched to non-verbal communication of bribes.

The last problem we sought to address with this revision was the lack of importance placed in evidence. We made it so that each round’s evidence was weighed against the opposing lawyer’s evidence for that round during the trial phase. The winner of each round would receive public opinion points. This way, each individual round’s evidence would influence the trial, instead of only the total amount mattering. We also made it so evidence was the only thing that affected public opinion. Lastly, we experimented with having two win conditions, one for getting the most money and one for getting the most reputation. The idea was to encourage players to team up since multiple players could win.

When playtesting this version with our classmates, we found that the shorter number of rounds allowed the game to progress more quickly, especially once players got the hang of things after the first trial. However, the “pick 3” system added more confusion than streamlining. Because players had 5 different types of actions available to them, it took a while to figure out what to do during their initial playthrough. Having so many options also made it difficult to keep track of them all, as players were constantly asking for reminders and clarifications. Players tended to fall back on spending their extra actions on buying reputation points, which wound up being too safe and overpowered. The change to the way evidence was handled did make evidence affect public opinion more, but the law of averages meant that most trials ended close to a draw. Players wound up confused about the purpose of evidence. And, since evidence wasn’t very important, no player even attempted to tamper . Overall, players just weren’t sure what was important, what the consequences were, and how to approach creating a strategy. One key reason for this was the multiple win conditions. Since both reputation and money were important, there was no single win condition to focus strategy around, leading to very middling, uninteresting play.

Playtesting the Final Iteration:

We revised our game once last time using feedback from the in-class playtest. Our remaining challenges were to make the purpose and value of evidence clearer to players, to better balance money and reputation amounts, and to incentivize bribes and special interests for the judge.

The final version of the game we made successfully tackled these issues. We gave winning evidence a concrete value (+1 reputation immediately) so that players would understand the value of evidence early on. Each piece of evidence was also given a numeric point value which gets tracked throughout and added up at the end of the trial. We also split up the lawyers’ turns into a few different phases. This way players would only every have 2 or 3 options at a time instead of having to manage 5. We calculated the various strategies players might take to win the game and balanced the money/reputation amounts for each strategy. A portion of this analysis is pictured below.

Mid-stage Version of Strategy Balance Analysis

And finally, we increased the cost of revealing cards so that judges would feel safer making bribes and special interests. In a final playtest, Eli, Fiona and Sami played through all 3 rounds of our game and found that these changes did a great job of balancing different game strategies while retaining the elements of fun.