P3 Reflection — Systemic Game Design
If you don’t reflect, you don’t learn, I’ve recently heard. This is my personal reflection on P3, the group project in which we design a systemic game.
Our board game, called “The Endless Roundabout” consisted of a roundabout in which each player represented a car/persona with an independent objective. Each objective had to do with a particular number of “certificates” that had to be collected through challenges that they could find in different slots of the board. Also, players had a specific level of rage that could be increased or decrease by interaction with other players by the effects of action cards and global scenarios that were drafted every round. If they reached the limit of rage each could resist, they would die and lose.
Each player could win the game if all the rest of the players died of rage or if they achieved their personal objective first. So, in consequence, it resulted in a very competitive game where collaboration was rare, except when being nice would bring them an improvement in their rage level. We wanted by this to show how being selfish could bring adverse consequences to the system as a whole, and maybe in that way making people more empathetic with other drivers in real life.
The end results were not as “finished” and flowing as I wanted them to be. The game itself has some sort of attractiveness that I think comes from the familiarity of that very particular situation simplified by a small systemic representation, pretty straight forward. In terms of mechanics, we were looking for mechanics of emergence, with straightforward rules but much variation. But trying to make it flow, we adjusted mechanics along the way, and we couldn’t find the sweet spot for simplicity and a good flow of the game. Again, a work in progress with a lot of potentials.
Several iterations went by until the end result. I think it is the project I worked on that had most iterations in such a short period. Those iterations with playtesters combined with our notetaking, and the improvements implemented, from my point of view were the most significant learning experience I can take with me. I feel that the cycle testing-redesigning is like some sort of gymnastics that you get better by doing, and if you get to do it so often, even better!
