The Game Of Making Games
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(Cristy Lytal)
Crowded around a colorful, homemade board, seven students seated at a table are playing a game called “You Won’t!” The game is based on a familiar concept: players roll dice to determine the number of squares their pawns advance around a linear track. Depending upon where their pieces land, the players pick up cards that present either one-time “challenges” — such as having a real-time haiku contest — or ongoing “afflictions” — such as acting like a gorilla.
Danny Anderson — a student with a flair for the dramatic — draws a card and announces the current challenge: inventing the best name for a feline.
“The most super, awesome, greatest cat name ever on the face of the Earth is Captain Meowosaurus Super Planet America!” declares student Larry Sequino.
“I think the best cat name on the planet is possibly Sexy Meowserson,” counters his bespectacled opponent, Brian Choi, who is voted the winner of the challenge by his fellow players.
This is a board game jam, and “You Won’t!” — along with six other games that students are playing at tables in the room — didn’t exist earlier in the evening. The teams of students invented and prototyped the games in six hours flat using an array of arts and crafts supplies — cardboard, markers, glitter, marbles and the occasional pack of playing cards, pickup sticks or dice.
The jam makes a game out of making games — thereby attracting a large group of mostly male college students to sacrifice their Friday nights to do what, under normal circumstances, would be considered school work. But tonight, they’re here to play — to meet new friends, exercise their imaginations and test their newly minted games on each other for the purpose of an evening’s diversion.
Erna Blanche, a USC occupational therapy professor, has some insight into what might be motivating these students. “We are genetically predisposed to play,” she explains. “Animals play; we play. And every culture has had a form of play.”
The amount that animals play varies considerably by species, according to Craig Stanford, co-director of USC’s Goodall Research Center. Birds and higher mammals often play, but reptiles generally don’t. Warblers toss rocks; elephants slip and slide down muddy slopes; horses kick up their heels; meerkats sumo wrestle; gorillas play tag. Humans will gladly indulge in all of these games and more.
“Play is indicative of a cognitively complex creature,” says Stanford, who is also a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at USC. “So there’s something important [going on] there. It’s not well understood, though.”
Jeremy Gibson — a cinema instructor — spent the jam creating a party game that requires players to make up jokes on the spot. Talking over the players’ laughter, Gibson explains his favorite theory of why people choose to play games. Formulated by game designer Richard Bartle, the theory identifies four archetypes.
Only two of the four types find motivation in the game itself. The first of these is the achiever, who is in it to win it. The second is the explorer who wants to travel through the world of the game and understand it.
“So the achiever would say, ‘I have the highest score,’ ” says Gibson, “and the explorer would say, ‘I’ve been everywhere on the map.’”
The other two types of players care about the social dynamics more than the game itself. Socializers come to the table just to hang out. Killers, in contrast, aim to dominate the other players.
“The socializer would say, ‘I have a lot of friends,’ says Gibson, “and the killer would say, ‘I totally conned all these people.’”
These motivations represent different aspects that exist within each individual player rather than four personality types.
“When I go into games,” he says, “I have a very, very strong explorer aspect, and a very strong socializer aspect. And then achiever, yeah. And then killer, not very much at all, because I really hate letting people have a bad day.”
At the board game jam, four of the more complicated, rule-heavy games — the kinds that would most strongly appeal to explorers and achievers — have already met untimely deaths by the end of the night. No one is playing them.
The only strategy-heavy game that remains on the table is “Noah’s Ark,” which requires its players to build boats out of rainbow-hued pick up sticks to shelter paper lions, tigers, bears and rabbits during an impending flood. It's attracted a quiet, cerebral group of five players who are patiently constructing seaworthy shapes.
“Games provide different challenges,” says Asher Vollmer, peering thoughtfully through wire-rim glasses. “ ‘Noah’s Ark’ is a mental challenge. ‘You Won’t!’ is a social challenge.”
The socializer aspect appears alive and well in the majority of the students, who are meowing, talking like pirates and bursting into raucous laughter during a lively game of “You Won’t!”
“In my opinion, simple is the best,” says Sequino. “If you’re actively making fun of yourself and making people laugh, you can pull off a game where you glue colored things to a board and make up silly things.”
“‘You Won’t!’ is a very social game, and it’s a very freeform game,” says Anderson.
“I think it’s an outdoor board game,” adds Michael Scott, a third student on the game’s design team. “Because it gets physical.”
On orders from the latest “challenge” card, the players of “You Won't!” leap to their feet for a quick round of hide-and-seek. The winner of the challenge will earn abstract kudos called “points;” the rest of the players will receive nothing, but still be glad they joined in the game.
That's because for explorers, achievers, killers and socializers alike, play is its own reward.
“Game play is intrinsically motivating,” says Gibson. “Understanding why we play enables us to understand how to structure other activities to be more motivating.”
