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So some of my perspective on what kinds of things you can
do in relation to game mechanics is kind of like
seeing [INAUDIBLE].
But it's not the be all and end all.
I'm basically showing you my perspective but it's not the
only perspective out there.
I have very little that I feel qualified to say about things
like sports.
Things where we are talking about athletic competitions.
Faster, higher, stronger, that sort of thing.
But I'm a little bit more engaged in games where there's
role-playing.
Where you're taking on a persona or at least some sort
of behavior that you aren't just
normally doing in real-life.
It's not just about how fast you can run or how skilled you
are at hitting the ball.
That sort of thing.
Let's see, and not every single live-action game needs
to necessarily fit within role-playing sports.
You've got things like party games.
This afternoon we'll have the lead designer for Dance
central coming in to do a little Q & A about Dance
Central around 4 o'clock, 4:30, in the TV lounge.
You guys are all welcome to do that.
And that's arguably a live-action game.
Sure you've got a computer, you've got a--
how much is the Kinect?
$150 piece of equipment connected to a $250 Xbox
hooked to a screen that's probably more than that.
You've got all this technology, but in the end,
what's that game about?
What's Rock Band about?
It's about the people who are in the living room.
And what is one of the arguments that [INAUDIBLE], in
a different chapter in Casual Revolution, he argues that one
of the big things that's happened with gaming is this
re-introduction of the space in front of the screen.
The living room space has come back into play.
You haven't lost that with board games or card games, but
for electronic games really it used to be something that
existed with arcade games.
You've got these giant motorcycles or steering wheels
and stuff like that.
And you still had it with some really expensive computer
games like flight simulators where
people buy the joysticks.
I'm a big train fan, so I've got a Playstation One train
controller.
It's throttle and brakes.
That's all it is.
No steering when it comes to trains.
It's a lot of fun.
With arcade games, and of course [INAUDIBLE], there's
this whole idea that you're going to be engaging your
entire body.
And you could argue that those are live-action games.
And you take the technology out and what you've got is
just this human body playing with all it's constraints,
beholden to gravity, it can't move faster than a certain
speed, it's kind of ungamely, and it's got
roughly a certain size.
Gives you constraints that you can work with in
terms of game mechanics.
One of the things that we did last year was we had a
live-action game assignment in this class.
And the constraint was you had to be able to play the
game in this room.
Was a newspaper a constant?
GUEST SPEAKER: No.
PROFESSOR: That was one huge decision to use newspaper as a
constraint.
But they did things like blindfold people.
They were playing around with the senses on the body so that
you could hear.
When one person had unlimited ammunition, in terms of low
vaulted newspaper and the bucket, but couldn't see where
everybody else was.
And everybody else could move around the room
on sheets of newspaper.
They had to step on sheets of newspaper.
So you could always hear where they were stepping.
And the person with the bucket was trying to pelt the people
who were stepping on the ground.
If you got hit you had to go out of the magic circle and
then start coming in.
The whole idea was to attack the person who was actually
throwing all these newspaper balls.
We had a little newspaper hat that you could grab.
It was pretty awesome, because what you need
to play that game?
You need one set of rules, and a chair, a recycle
bin--specifically it was that bin--
and newspaper.
But there were all these things in play about
what you can do.
So OK, your target is going to be roughly the size of a human
body, and roughly the weight of a human body.
It's going to be able to move at roughly the same speed of a
human body.
And you cannot have multiple targets in the
same place at once.
In fact it's hilarious when you try, because you've got
these [INAUDIBLE].
And because you're playing with the humans, all five of
the human senses, usually just like hearing.
I don't know that anyone's made a smell game.
But you will have the situation where the people who
are standing on the newspapers will try to make noise near
the other people who are playing the game.
So they were drawing attention away from themselves.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes it leads to hilarious collisions --a good
time was had by all.
And those kinds of party games.
You know, King of the Hill?
Can anyone think of any other playground type games that are
personal favorites?
AUDIENCE: Freeze tag.
PROFESSOR: Freeze tag?
[?
AUDIENCE: Lava.
PROFESSOR: What's?
[?
AUDIENCE: Lava's where you have swings and all things you
can climb on.
And you're playing generally on the little pebble-like
rocky stuff.
And if you step on the pebble stuff that's like the lava and
you get burnt.
So you have to stay hanging on the metal part.
And usually there's someone who's immune to the lava
trying to tag you.
So they can walk over the lava but they
can't go in the structure.
AUDIENCE: Lava monster.
PROFESSOR: Does the game ever stop?
Just out of curiosity?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, someone becomes the next lava monster.
Once you get tagged you switch roles and keep doing it.
AUDIENCE: But the thing is, I never played that on my
playground.
I always played in my living room and throw couch cushions
on the floor and stuff.
AUDIENCE: That sounds really dangerous.
AUDIENCE: We'd have wheely chairs and push off and yeah.
PROFESSOR: I used to have a water bed.
So there was some unpredictability that I could
have in my bedroom with my two brothers.
But they were both bigger than me so I always lost.
I mean, you can think of--
on one hand, these are athletic games because they do
test your ability to move and control your body.
Which is why they're so popular around kids who are
trying to master what their bodies are capable of.
But on the other hand, they're also games of mimicry going
back to [INAUDIBLE]
definition.
Because you're pretending that it's lava, and pretending that
you're a person that cares that it's lava, or a monster
that's immune to it.
And these games don't necessarily--
they may have some rules about, OK you
can tag now we swap.
I've seen games where sure, I've technically been tagged
out of this game but since this game really has no end
state that just means that oh, I lost.
Now I'm back in the game again.
It's like playing a Doom death match and you die and you're
just right back in the game again.
Let's see, anyone play those--
what's the name of the football variant where you
just have a scarf attached to you?
AUDIENCE: Flag football.
PROFESSOR: For those of you-- everyone knows what it is?
AUDIENCE: Isn't flag football where you just have a flag and
instead of being tackled you?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, instead of tackling you
just grab the flag.
And that's an abstraction.
That's an abstraction of something that you well could
physically do.
You could grab this person and pull them to the ground.
AUDIENCE: Does touch football exist?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
PROFESSOR: That's a smaller level of abstraction because
you can really hit someone pretty damn
hard with touch football.
But it's an abstraction of, here's this thing that I
personally, physically, could do.
But I'm going to introduce this level
of abstraction for--
I don't know-- safety.
That's usually the reason.
And so you've got the human body and you've got all of its
values and virtues and all of its curses.
You've got issues of safety.
You don't want people to hurt each other, but yet human
beings and their bodies are extremely capable of hurting
each other with no added implement at all.
Even worse when it gets to a game and someone's trying to
win something.
If you don't have a specific rule that says you can't punch
this person, but you have a game that's very athletic,
someone's going to try.
That's why you get these sort of abstractions to pretend in
that military form that all right, I've grabbed
this thing off you.
Now you have just been tagged.
I've effectively tackled you [INAUDIBLE].
So, what I'm trying to draw attention to with these
examples is that with live-actions games the thing
that you have to keep in mind all the time is at what point
is the person who's playing actually the
character who's playing?
It's really, really, hard to tell when it comes to
live-action games.
If you are playing in sports it's the same thing.
Any given athlete and their performance in the sport is
who they are.
It's the same person.
If I'm role-playing then the person that I'm playing is not
supposed to be the same.
But there needs to be a whole bunch of rules that basically
specify that the character that I'm playing is not
actually the person that you're seeing in front of you.
For that time, the player is not the Count of Monte Cristo
or something like that.
AUDIENCE: One interesting
exception to that is wrestling.
Not wrestling like actual high-school wrestling, but
wrestling on TV--
I don't remember what it's called.
Because everybody puts on a persona.
They're never the same person that they are.
I just thought it was interesting when you said that
any sports person, but that's one exception.
PROFESSOR: That's true.
And that creates a lot of discussion about whether
wrestling is a sport.
It's athletic.
Everyone agrees that it's athletic.
But so are trapeze artists athletic but you wouldn't call
it a sport.
And in fact, if I understand correctly, wrestlers are
insured as circus performers, because they have the same
risks and are playing the same role as a performance.
But you're right, that's one of those things
where it's a persona.
The really, really, good wrestling networks play around
with what's real and what's not.
Yeah sure, these two people are putting on these
ridiculous personalities.
Threatening to kill each other over the most trivial and
made-up of the offenses, and crazy accents, and costumes,
and everything.
But when they're bleeding they're actually bleeding.
There's no denying and no doubt they actually get angry
with each other and people actually get hurt.
And playing around with that line is actually some of the
appeal that we get in things like professional wrestling.
I guess that's what the terminology that they use.
It's very different from something like
mixed martial arts.
I don't watch mixed martial arts.
AUDIENCE: No, I don't think so, I'm pretty sure
it's just flat out.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] are very associated with the person.
PROFESSOR: So they are the persona.
AUDIENCE: They don't have stage personalities, but they
do have strong personalities.
AUDIENCE: That's definitely a sport.
I mean, they're actually fighting.
PROFESSOR: I mean let's take a look at
Muhammad Ali for instance.
Extremely athletic person but his personality had a lot to
do with it as well with how successful that he was.
The way that he taunted people on TV and on cameras before
the game, so that people would get all worked up for the
game, made him a star.
Sure he was athletic, but that was part of it.
So where that line is, and as designers you get some control
over that through the rules that you're writing.
And there are a couple of tactics that you can focus on.
But I want to segue into--
that's the tension.
That is one thing that's pulling your
design in one direction.
Which is, how am I going to figure out what the difference
between the person who's playing this game and the
character that they're playing, or the role that
they're playing, is going to be.
In your games, for this next assignment, if you've got
people playing mental patients then you've got to figure out
how you're going to draw that line.
You've got to be clear whether it's the player who's actually
upset at you or the character who's actually upset at you.
But if you draw that line too broadly, then you've got the
situation where both be angry at you [INAUDIBLE].
Because this is a ridiculous situation and emotional.
Pretending to be really emotional can usually make a
lot of people react by laughing just to release the
tension in space.
In fact, that happened when Dion was role-playing with
Caesar, right?
Sure, they were laughing.
They were trying to level that and take it as seriously as
possible, and everybody else in the room was cracking up.
To release that tension.
And sometimes that's OK playing games.
In fact, sometimes that's great for the game.
And sometimes that's detrimental.
Depends on what you're playing for.
But you have to understand that is something that's
pulling the overall design, why do rules exist, and why
your game mechanics exist, and why your game mechanic is
pretending a certain way.
That's one of the tensions that's pulling it
in a certain direction.
And in reality, that's actually
two different tensions.
Because in one sense, they're trying to make an experience
as aversive, as feeling like you're
actually doing it as possible.
And on the other hand, you don't want to make it so
associated with who you are, and what you're actually
doing, that people start to think, oh wow.
This person, this player, is actually mad at me.
Or, this player could actually hit me at this point.
While as, no the character [INAUDIBLE].
I call that verisimilitude.
These are just words that I picked up from dictionaries.
This one, you were in my masters thesis.
Verisimilitude is basically a tension when you're designing
a game mechanic.
And that tension is telling you, I want to make this
experience as immersive and as true to life as possible.
And the opposite of that is what I call dissociation.
Which is really hard to pronounce.
It's not like I just call it separation.
But, how do you draw that line between who I am and who my
character is?
And I'll give you a couple of examples just to
get inside this now.
Who doesn't know what a live-action
role-playing game is?
Or doesn't have a good clear idea?
OK.
So maybe, a little bit of background just so that I can
use the examples.
Do you folks know how a table-top role-playing game
generally works?
OK.
So, start from scratch.
Imagine improv theatre.
Imagine you have an environment where you have a
bunch of people who want to enact some
sort of scene together.
In theatre, a scene is usually something like five minutes,
maybe half an hour.
In a live-action role-playing game, that's more like an hour
to 10 days to 30 days long.
A much longer period of time.
But the motivation is the same.
We're in this space to enact some sort of shared reality,
shared creative reality, together.
In a role-playing game that's done by the
usual addition of rules.
And usually some sort of world setting and some sort of
character description.
And how these things are told to you could be as simple as
the game master walks up to each person and explains
what's going on.
You are all cats in an alley-way and some of you are
hungry and looking for food.
Some of you are on top of the pecking order and make sure
you get all of the food.
Here's how you eat food.
Here's how you move food around.
Go.
That sort of thing.
A game master could just do it at that level, and you've got
a live-action role-playing game.
There's usually some sort of end condition or at least some
sort of time limit to tell you when the game's over.
When you get a little bit more detailed, and when you start
mixing and matching it with the conventions of other kind
of role-playing games-- computer and table-top
role-playing games--
you have things like character sheets where you're given your
information on a piece of paper, or you create your
information on a piece of paper.
And that information is information that's only
available to you and the game master.
A secret information for all intents and purposes.
You will use different means to convey chunks of the
information to the rest of the world.
Like I'm actually not female, but I'm
playing a female character.
So maybe I'll wear a badge or something that has
my gender on it.
And that tells the rest of the world treat me like a female.
That's one example.
I may actually be psychic, but the rest of the world can't
necessarily see that.
Except for maybe other psychic people.
So maybe I'll have a little Greek symbol or something--
not Psi, that would be too obvious--
or maybe my badge is just a different color or something.
And people who are not psychic have no idea what that means.
And people who are playing other psychic characters now
see, [INAUDIBLE] has a red badge.
I am sensing psychically.
And then there are other game mechanics that I can do with
that person.
Actually all the psychic people know each other's cell
phone numbers or something and can talk to each other.
That's an example.
AUDIENCE: That's awesome.
PROFESSOR: That would be to your advantage.
So the connection with improv theatre is actually stronger
than a lot of people may generally assume.
Because a lot of people think of live-action role-playing
games and they focus on the games part of it.
And they think of it as a RPG in the computer sense.
So your role is your character in the sense of, I have my
character's stats, my character's abilities, a lot
of these steps and abilities don't necessarily need to be
written down.
Because, again, you're dealing with a human body.
So, how strong is my character?
I don't know.
How strong are you?
How long a sword do I have?
Well, how long is that piece of foam over there?
That's your sword now.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
I played a character that was supposed to
be very, very, strong.
And I am not very, very, strong.
But I had a disclaimer badge and the that it manifested
itself in game play was that at some point they challenged
someone to an arm-wrestling duel.
And they made sure--
they looked at my stat and saw, oh I
know what this means.
And so even though they were about twice my size they
pretended to lose.
It was very entertaining.
PROFESSOR: So the spectrum of on one hand
there are these games.
The type of games that Jeremy describes allows you to play
things that are physically very different from you.
And then there are some live-action
role-playing games--
AUDIENCE: Where it's just how strong you are.
PROFESSOR: --Yeah, it's just how strong you are.
A lot of those are like [INAUDIBLE]
LARPs, where people will dress up in actual armor that
they've decided to make out of leather or duct tape.
And they will swing around swords instead of foam padded.
They'll go out to a forest somewhere--
typically in New England--
and spend two days, three days, in the middle of a
forest sleeping in a cabin somewhere and pretending to
fantasy adventure it.
And every once in awhile there will be GM controlled
volunteers who will be wearing [INAUDIBLE] masks.
That's on the other spectrum.
It's a spectrum.
It's not like the [INAUDIBLE]
LARPs where you run around with sticks and are Assassins
Guild type LARPs where most of your abilities are governed by
numbers and stats.
Kind of this spectrum.
You can think of assassin guild type thing as being very
much inspired by what you could do on a computer or what
you could do on a table-top LARP.
Because on a table-top LARP, how strong your character is
has nothing to do with how strong the player is.
It's what [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Playing a game just recently, I found out that in
New England there are basically LARPs which get done
with rifles.
AUDIENCE: They're military level.
AUDIENCE: But they're not paintball.
So you shoot people.
AUDIENCE: With plastic pellets?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Yeah, air-soft is what they call them.
And so one team will dress up as US soldiers, and the other
ones are like middle-eastern soldiers.
It's elaborate and slightly distasteful.
You can go and look at their website.
I think it's the New England Airsoft Association or
something like that.
And they have excerpts of a video cam of these.
And there's negotiation between the two sides
and what have you.
They actually take on the roles of the insurgents or the
[INAUDIBLE].
Sometimes they're just shooting each other.
Other times they're trying to find out who in the town who
is the bad guy.
PROFESSOR: Sometimes it gets more elaborate.
And some of us are actually going to be [INAUDIBLE] and
some of us are actually going to be combatants and you have
to figure out who's who.
That one will be really, really, interesting
[INAUDIBLE] for IEDs.
That's something that annoys me about games that involve
Middle Eastern combatants.
Is that, they don't have rules for IEDs.
And that's the primary form of contact in those states.
That's to the point.
Military exercises a lot of them are basically live-action
role-playing games.
All the way from I'm actually running around with a gun full
of blanks or shooting pellets or shooting a laser beam that
is going to register on some other soldier's gear.
AUDIENCE: We call them war games.
PROFESSOR: We call them--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: --Yes, that's a good thing.
Then you also have the other end of military simulations
where it's just a bunch of people in a room
looking at a screen.
Or not even a screen, a white board with a world map on it,
and they're moving forces around like a table player.
But those are still considered live-action action things,
because every person in the room is representing someone
in the chain of command that would normally be in a war
room attack.
I am the commander.
You are the lieutenant, or something like that, and I'm
going to say, get me the status of Washington D.C. Has
it been nuked yet?
And the lieutenant says we have three missiles coming in
based on some look up.
The term for that is typically called creep [INAUDIBLE],
especially when it's real people playing
against real people.
It's two or more player game where not everyone is
one the same side.
If it's just on one side then just the war game terminology
tends to be more a catch all.
But when you have two players on each side, and are playing
through these things, how results get
resolved also can vary.
There are obviously digital and
mathematical ways to compute.
OK, I've given an order to fire a missile at Singapore.
And it's going to take two hours for it to land.
And there's a percentage that it might land.
You could do it.
You could do that way.
But traditionally, what's actually been done is that you
say this is what I'm going to do.
And someone far more experienced than you, usually
your instructor or one of several instructors, takes
that information, goes into another room, and talks to the
people who are actually doing the same thing with your
opposing team.
And they're just saying, OK in this event
what's going to happen?
And then they go back to each team and they
report, missile missed.
Or, your troops engaged.
You found your opponent's troops at this location and
you've lost 50% of your troops.
That sort of thing.
And that's the traditional [INAUDIBLE].
The nice thing about that is that takes advantage of the
fact that not just the players but everybody is a live-action
human being.
Because you have flexibility.
You can do ridiculous things that programmers or game
designers may not necessarily have assumed were possible,
but happen to make sense in the heat of
that particular game.
And you have real people deciding, this is
what's going to happen.
So we'll make up a logical solution.
In the military, that's why you want people who are really
experienced.
In a non-military live-action role-playing game, like the
kind that's played around MIT, people will still do that.
So I'm in a game where I have a steampunk setting.
And I don't have all the equipment I need to build this
machine of death that I'm supposed to be completing.
But I could take apart some of the other machines
that are in the world.
And then the game master says, wait a minute.
We've got to put rules about that.
Or, we don't want to start anyone taking apart
[INAUDIBLE].
But it makes perfect sense in this world.
So, OK, it's going to take you two hours and you have to be
in this room.
But after that, you'll have the parts you need.
The other side of live-action role-playing is that often the
people who are controlling the game of live-action say that
wasn't fair.
And again, they can improvise along with the players.
So you have that bit of flexibility.
You're limited by how experienced most people are.
People who don't tend to be terribly experienced tend to
make rash decisions that end up hurting the
playability of the game.
Sometimes they get lucky.
Sometimes they don't.
Let me see, one example early on when I was making
live-action role-playing games, was I had a game
mechanic where if one of the police officers in this sort
of detective scenario wanted to do a background check they
could ask the game master.
Some amount of time--
actually it was fairly instant.
Because the very molded kind of system.
The assumption was that they will find a computer and
they'll look it up.
And we'll give them information.
And that led to two problems was that, first of all what
happens if I'm not physically in the same location as the
person who wants the information?
And this is weird to think of a computer with
legs walking around.
It sounds very science fiction.
And on the other hand, it means that I needed to have
all the information about everybody at my
finger tips at all times.
Which often wasn't true.
So someone would come in, I need the information about
this character.
I'm performing a look up.
And it's like, I'll get back to you in two hours.
Because I don't have the information here with me I'm
going to look it up and I'll give it to you later.
Now I don't make that mistake anymore, but that was the kind
of mistake I made when I was a [INAUDIBLE].
Because I hadn't really thought about what that would
require from me as a game master.
Now that's a different tension.
I am actually going to read a chunk of this--
[INAUDIBLE].
I talked about dissociation or separation.
And what I'm talking about with that mistake that I made
is just plain old feasibility.
Something that you probably have already run into it with
the games that you've designed.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PROFESSOR: And many of the games that you've designed
[INAUDIBLE] could have thought of as just plane of scope.
It's like, how big is this game?
How long is it going to take us to put
all these bits together?
[INAUDIBLE].
Can we order these bits in time?
And are they going to be delivered in
time for the class?
I know multiple teams had this problem.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Let me see if I can combine some
of these ideas together.
One thing that the Assassin Guild likes to have are people
who have locked memories.
They know something, but they don't know that they know it.
Little memory packets, little pieces of paper that they
printed out and folded up and stapled.
Takes you about 20 seconds to make one of those.
Now imagine a game that has maybe 60 people.
And each person maybe has five locked memories because the
GM's really love the idea.
And 5 times 3 is
AUDIENCE: That's only about an hour.
Only about an hour.
PROFESSOR: Only about an hour.
Does it ever only actually take an hour to actually
produce that?
You get staple cuts and you have to write them all.
AUDIENCE: It's a little less than two hours actually.
AUDIENCE: No way.
AUDIENCE: 20 seconds per 60 people.
AUDIENCE: But it's not 20 seconds each.
PROFESSOR: And then what happens is that oh, wow, we
have 300 pieces of paper all of which are now folded and
almost indistinguishable from each other.
And we've got to figure out who gets which.
And these are the concerns.
That's a feasibility issue.
Doing something like that for one or two players is
extremely feasible.
It takes almost no time for the game master.
Doing that for your entire player base, if you have a 60
person game, on the large scale becomes the majority of
your prep time.
Suddenly you're setting aside a whole day just
to deal with that.
And a game's only three days long or something like that.
With that level of effort.
Things to preserve the game master's sanity.
The MIT janitorial staff, facility staff, are pretty
ruthless when it comes to picking up stuff that has
fallen on the floor.
So say that's a really important piece of paper that
you've taped up on the wall somewhere's here at MIT.
And there's information that this is the place that your
players are looking for.
They've combed all of campus and they need
to find this location.
And that tape that you used just wasn't that
strong and it fell.
And the janitorial staff just picks it up
and throws it away.
Now what happens to your game?
Can your game even end?
Are you just going to have a whole bunch of really tired
players chasing you down as the game master?
So the way that you resolve this can be built into the
game mechanics.
You can build things like multiple redundancy.
Like in addition to a sign there will usually be this
other thing in this same area.
If you find one and you don't find the other, it means
something has dropped off.
Involve the game master and the game master will go and
fix it at some point in time in the future.
If you have a game that has no secret locations, and you have
a game that's campus wide, you could just give people a map
of all the information.
Sure, you still want stuff on the wall because it's neat to
be able to walk into a classroom like this and say,
oh mortuary.
That's where I am.
And then suddenly reminded, oh maybe I should be role-playing
back then and that sort of thing.
But it's sort of like walking through a space and you have a
map that told you you're in a mortuary.
But you weren't looking at your space, so you just walked
through the space in entry to the classroom.
Yes, I am going to do my tutoring in this room.
It's a morgue, why are you doing tutoring?
So it's neat to be able to have those things to give
players information about what's going on in the space.
And to help them make believe, help them imagine what they
could possibly do in the space.
Maybe even give them clues about what they need to be
doing in order to advance their goals.
But then you also want to be able to have backup plans for
when those things fail.
That's part of feasibility.
You don't want the game to break halfway just because
janitorial staff came through or the wind blew or something
and now your game sucks.
That's another type of information.
And that's not entirely unlike the information that we've
discussed in this class back earlier this semester.
But with live-action games, especially live-action games
that don't have any kind of turn based thing, they're
happening in real time and they're moving in real-time.
Information overload on the player becomes something that
you have to be very careful of when you're designing your
game mechanic.
How much is someone expected to know at any given time?
This is going to be very applicable for any of the
games that you design for the third assignment.
If you decide to do a live-action game, think about
here's somebody who's moving around in a space.
Maybe it's a hospital or it may be the doctor's office.
And this person is trying to remember X numbers of
statistics about their character.
How agitated I am, the number that determines how many drugs
are part of me right now, and that sort of thing.
You've got these stats.
And once again, too high, then what happens is you've got a
character that's standing there trying to do all the
math in their head and not role-playing.
If they're role-playing anything, they're role-playing
a mathematician or a [INAUDIBLE] in their minds.
And you're losing the immersion, you're losing the
[INAUDIBLE] to be I'm supposed to be an angry person.
But I'm standing here trying to do math
about how angry I am.
And you've got attention of information and very
[INAUDIBLE].
There are times when you actually want that though.
There are ways to take that and turn
it into your advantage.
In particular, when the thing that you want
people to be doing--
the kind of activity that you want people to engage in--
are the things that players would generally be
uncomfortable doing with each other.
Physical violence would be a good example of that.
I want to be able to hurt this other character, but I don't
want to hurt this other player.
So what are the things that I can do to bridge that gap?
AUDIENCE: Insult his mother.
PROFESSOR: Verbally, sure, there are ways to do that.
But you might need rules or at least some guidance from the
GM to say, take that seriously.
Because that can very easily drift into the realm of, yeah
that's just a joke.
AUDIENCE: Rock, paper, scissors?
PROFESSOR: Rock, paper, scissors?
That could be a mechanic for a fist fight, for instance.
Or [INAUDIBLE]
that you start see them avoiding that.
AUDIENCE: Nerf guns.
PROFESSOR: Nerf guns?
Things that shoot little pieces of plastic.
But odds and evens.
AUDIENCE: How about tokens like in [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Say what?
AUDIENCE: Health tokens like in [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Give me some more detail.
AUDIENCE: Like if someone was a certain number of flags, and
so you hurt them by taking one.
PROFESSOR: So the player might have
multiple flags for instance.
OK, gets them angry.
It's like health bar almost, actually.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So dice rolling is under the general term like
things randomizing numbers.
In fact, rock, paper, scissors, is randomizing
things almost.
And then you have toy weapons, right?
Probably not so relevant for the game violence.
But you could imagine setting up a room full of foam things
which you will be quite happy to throw at each other.
You know that this cylinder of foam, of pipe-insulating
material, is not going to hurt anyone when you throw it.
Which makes it more likely that I'm going to pick it up
and throw it at someone.
Clearly it's something that's designed for me to throw that
the GMs put there.
And if you want your players to be engaging in that kind of
activity that's technically--
you could have put a real bottle there.
You could have put a real mug or computer or something.
That's the reason why you as the GM could have, but they
are deliberately designing to put something fake there to
clue the player into maybe there's something I can do
with that I wouldn't necessarily want to do if it
was the real thing.
I wouldn't want to throw a real bottle at somebody, but I
would easily throw a foam bottle at somebody.
Same thing for Nerf guns, dart guns, this guns, it's like you
put something with a trigger in somebody's hands that's
going to launch a little cheap piece of plastic at someone?
They're itching for a chance to use it, really.
Let's see, what else?
Dice are difficult.
The problem with dice is you need a flat surface to roll
them on, and you might not have that.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Still a little bit risky, because they could end
up going all over the floor.
AUDIENCE: Another thing that I've seen people do is some
kind of [INAUDIBLE] style thing.
Where essentially they have [INAUDIBLE] or something, you
might have created them.
You can beat a challenge by giving one to the other player
that you're fighting with.
And then [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So it's like the amount of energy you've got.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's like the amount of energy you've got.
And also, if you discard them or give them to another player
then it's the difference between these things are just
gone and they circulate around.
PROFESSOR: [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so if there's the circulation thing than you
can get whooped a few times.
But after being whooped then suddenly you get a chance to
whoop back.
And then it becomes less [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: That was interesting.
This is the good part that I want to talk about which is
[INAUDIBLE].
A topic that you guys are already very familiar with.
But, at what point do your game mechanics--
are you designing your game mechanics not necessarily to
enhance the realism or to encourage certain behaviors or
to give the player enough information about what they're
allowed to do or what they should be doing?
And you're just going into the realm of how do I make this
competitively interesting?
Real fights, if you get a bunch of blows,
you do not get stronger.
Well, if you're Bruce [? Bannon ?] maybe.
But from a competitive point of view, or from a traditional
game play point of view, that sounds like a great idea.
That gets you back into the game, whereas any very
realistic fight mechanic is really probably going to be a
positive feedback mechanic.
You win, you keep winning.
You can think of these five different things as--its not
like game balance, but these are decisions that you have to
make either as an individual designer or as a team about
what any given mechanic in your game is trying to
accomplish.
It's rarely mutually exclusive.
It's usually trying to involve multiple one of these things.
You don't want to fall down on any of these, especially not
feasibility.
It's like, yes this is the perfect game mechanic!
And we had two years to be able to put together all the
things that we had.
And for the games that have failed to run
because of that idea.
Especially live-action games that have a hidden computer
component, especially if they're designed by MIT
students, rapidly designed into a software engineering
project that never finishes.
The game kind of disappears and it's all about this damn
website that would have solved everything else.
It's completely realistic because of the hacking
mechanic that actually happens on the computer.
And the skills scale to your ability as a character which
the computer already knows, and you don't have to
remember, so you can feel really neat.
And it's competitive because you know what the opponents
are doing, but not everything they're doing, and it's going
to take us five years to write this code.
The game's never going to happen.
Let's see, let me think about an example just to sort of put
some ideas in your head.
Back to the idea of things that players might be
uncomfortable doing with each other.
Seduction is one of those things that's--
if you don't have a game mechanic for it, it never
happens in the way that you want it to
that helps the game.
If it happens, it's happening between the players and that
causes all kinds of problems.
So you come up with a rule, come up with a game mechanic,
that feels nothing like real-life seduction.
We're going to play a game of blackjack now, if I win you're
now in love with me.
And it's like, that's not how seduction actually works, but
it actually makes it easier for players to
say, I can do that.
I can play a game of blackjack.
There's no social awkwardness in
playing a game of blackjack.
AUDIENCE: You can associate that with, I win this game so
I slipped inside your glass a love potion so now you're in
love with me.
Something like that.
PROFESSOR: But see, in that particular case you're
describing an action that people might be more actually
willing to do through some sort of simple mechanic.
Like OK, instead of love potion we're going to mechanic
that enables you to something.
I'm going to actually give you a file.
And if you drink something in the tea, like maple syrup,
talk to the GM.
Because you probably just drank some magic potion.
But if the goal is, all right we're playing
a film noire game.
And you're supposed to be engaging in constant witty
banter, laden with sexual innuendo, a lot of people have
a lot of difficulty with that.
Sometimes it works.
I made it work in some games.
But it makes it a lot easier if the success or failure in
that is not going to be bottlenecked by whether the
players feel comfortable doing it.
So creating a game mechanic that actually feels a little
bit less than what activity you're trying to represent may
make it easier for people to engage in the activity.
Same thing goes in combat, playing rock, paper, scissors,
feels nothing like an actual fight.
But people will be much more willing to play rock, paper,
scissors with each other than to punch each other.
So come up a rule, give them a little plastic gun, give them
something to make it easier, and they'll be willing to
engage in that activity more often.
Violence in the rule will probably be the thing that
comes up a lot in this setting.
So, let me see what else we can get into.
It's about 2 o'clock.
How many folks here have played some variant of Mafia
or Werewolf or?
Who's played Mafia in particular?
OK, who's played Werewolf?
So those are live-action games too.
And those are live-action games that specifically don't
try to draw too sharp a division between who you are
and who your player is.
You are given a role, a card, that basically says whether
you're Mafia or whether you're a villager I think.
AUDIENCE: Civilian.
PROFESSOR: And the whole idea is that everybody who's--
that's a character sheet that gives you private, secret,
information about the role that you're supposed to play.
But in my opinion, these particular games-- and we're
going to play some variants of them--
what you are told by the cards is only what
you're allowed to do.
What actually gives you the role is what you decide to do.
I play Mafia and I'm going to say, Patrick needs to die.
And other people in the room agree with me, and Patrick's
character gets taken out of the game.
That decision is the decision that made me Mafia.
And that decision is the decision that other people are
trying to catch, because they are trying to find a person
who's actually responsible for various acts when everybody's
eyes are closed.
The general model for these games is there are cycles.
For Werewolf it's a day and night cycle, and for Mafia
it's also day and night.
But the idea is that during the night everybody who's not
Mafia gets to have their eyes open.
Everybody who is Mafia--
everybody who's not Mafia keeps their eyes closed.
Everyone who is Mafia keeps their eyes open.
And people who are Mafia can communicate through some GM
mediator, some game master mediated way, to specify the
player to be taken out of the game at this point.
It's usually a point.
I see things with blinks.
Because as the GM moves around sometimes that gives you
clues, because you can hear.
Even with your eyes closed you can hear where the GM is.
And then that's like the night cycle.
And during the day cycle everyone opens their eyes and
whoever's been taken out of the game informs you.
And everyone knows and everybody starts discussing
and accusing each other of being responsible for it.
And the whole point of the game is for the villagers to
identify who all the Mafia is before everyone finishes.
It's a live-action game that doesn't have a lot of action.
I would say, it's one action.
There's closing your eyes, opening your
eyes, and there's pointing.
There are variants where
sometimes there is a Godfather.
AUDIENCE: I've seen websites with whole lists of different
roles that are just ridiculous.
Like there's grave keeper, there's necromancers.
PROFESSOR: There's people who can bring characters
back from the dead.
There are people who can basically do
a background check.
I think that's--
AUDIENCE: Oh, that's right you told us.
PROFESSOR: -- angels and cops.
And you go from two cycles to three cycles per round.
Four cycles per round where different people
have their eyes open.
And you get different bits of information about what the
world state is like.
The fact that killing somebody is pointing at them, that's a
dissociation mechanic right?
It's not like you're actually being asked to engage in
physical combat.
Even though the fiction of the game is that you're
assassinating this person in the middle of the night.
The verisimilitude, and competition, will largely come
down to the discussion phase.
They are trying to put players in an environment where you've
got a paranoid of villagers, a paranoid town, and they're all
mutually accusing each other.
And both the act of trying to not be accused, and trying to
deduce who is the right person to accuse, is a compelling
competitive experience.
That's what all these games are really about.
So all the emphasis, all the time of the game frankly, is
devoted to that phase when everyone sits down and
discusses with each other who could be the Mafia.
You want to walk us through one of the variants maybe?
GUEST SPEAKER: Yeah, do you want to actually play it?
Or just describe it?
PROFESSOR: We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
We could have two groups or one big group.
GUEST SPEAKER: One big group may take awhile.
PROFESSOR: Let's do two groups but how many
different rule variants?
GUEST SPEAKER: I only found one that I thought was really
interesting, although we can certainly-- even the Wikipedia
page has a million variants.
AUDIENCE: The one I normally would play would be one where
there's mafia and there's cops.
There might be a medic.
AUDIENCE: Inspector, angel, and prostitute.
AUDIENCE: What's the prostitute do again?
AUDIENCE: If you sleep with the mafia
they don't kill anybody.
If you sleep with an inspector they get incorrect
information.
If you sleep with a nurse they don't heal.
PROFESSOR: This is it's very important to make sure you
know what rules that you're playing with
before the game starts.
So walk us through the roles, and then what we'll do is
we'll break this into two groups.
And we'll have two groups play separately and that's probably
the end of the class activity.
GUEST SPEAKER: I had found a variant called Thing, which is
based on the John Carpenter movie.
Which is interesting because it takes out one of the roles.
The idea is one person is the shape shifting thing, and at
night they infect someone else and that person becomes a
thing as well.
So they're not knocked out, out right.
And then during the day the group votes and decides on one
person to test.
And if they test a thing that person is killed and they get
to test another one.
And the idea is that the things are trying to outnumber
the people.
Which is interesting because it takes away
that inspector role.
AUDIENCE: Do you know who gets thinged in the
middle of the night?
GUEST SPEAKER: So, I was thinking about this.
What you would need is for the person who is the thing to
indicate to the moderator.
And then maybe the moderator could tap them or something.
AUDIENCE: Ok, so if you're a thing you know you're a thing.
GUEST SPEAKER: Yeah.
The things are spreading as opposed to just--
AUDIENCE: And then if there's two things, do they both just
agree on another?
On a third?
GUEST SPEAKER: Presumably.
So this is really interesting because apparently this is
played at a conference for science fiction writers.
So there's little snippets of it on the web about the rules
from different blogs and stuff.
And it's not as interesting, but of course the problem is
how do you Google for mafia thing?
It's not interesting to me, and then it seems like there's
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So it might be fine actually to have two groups
figure out how to play that game just from the description
that you've just been given.
I think [INAUDIBLE]
there's going to be enough people who've played
traditional Mafia to know how it works.
And then we'll just reconvene at the end of it and see what
each version people came up with.
What were the similarities and what were the differences.
Again, that's the flexibility of doing a live-action game
when the people who are actually coming up the the
rules are actually in the same room as the players, or are
the players themselves.
You get to make stuff up on the fly as
long as everyone agrees.
So let's give it a shot.
While Jason is sorting out, any questions about the stuff?
AUDIENCE: The two biggest challenges that I've come
across in the block mechanics have to do with surgical
challenges and intellectual skill.
So let's go intellectual.
It's easy to play a character that's stupider than you.
It's really hard to play a character that's
smarter than you.
In particular, it's really hard to play a character
that's smarter than you if you don't have a GM around all the
time to tell you, stop.
So, if you have any ideas about how to deal with that.
The other one is, I'm creating social conflicts.
Like, this is harder than any role-playing game because it
feels like if you want to be able to persuade a character
or something you just want to persuade them because you're
role-playing right?
But you're supposed to be playing a character who is
more persuasive than you.
But it feels really cheap.
If you can just sort of.
PROFESSOR: You believe me now!
AUDIENCE: It also ties into another area that frequently
pops up in LARP's and role-playing games in general
which is use of metagame knowledge.
So frequently if you've been persuaded to do something then
you've come across players using their metagame knowledge
that they don't want to do the thing that they're being
mechanically forced to do.
And they're trying to find loopholes constantly.
I don't know if you can really force people to abandon their
metagame knowledge mechanically?
But I don't know.
PROFESSOR: I have some examples on how the Assassin's
Guild in particular has dealt with that.
And in some ways it's cheating, because we're not
going to try to do some of those things.
In particular, let's take persuasion for
one of those things.
The problem with persuasion is that whatever mechanic you
come to, other than what you see is what you get--
[INAUDIBLE]--
any other mechanic that you come up with runs that risk of
the, wait a minute this is not what I really,
really, want to do.
So the Assassin's Guild has replaced that with
brainwashing.
Which is the whole idea of, you're not being persuaded.
You goals are being forcibly changed, but now you have
other goals.
And that's the big difference.
Your old goals are no longer your win conditions.
Your new goals are now your win conditions.
You can still win the game by obeying your new goals.
AUDIENCE: That's cool.
PROFESSOR: The brainwashing mechanism.
AUDIENCE: So you've aligned the interests of the player
with the interest of the character.
PROFESSOR:You want to go with your new goals now because--
how this came up, typically in the Assassin's Guild, the
Assassin's Guild actually grew out from
circle of death games.
Which is, getting to know you.
I have the name of somebody, and I need to shoot them with
this water gun.
Who is this person again?
I don't know.
I'm a freshman.
I haven't met everyone on campus.
I'm going to figure out who this person is.
That's where those games came from.
The Assassin's Guild kind of grew up from that.
Then it became teams.
And brainwashing was basically the set of game mechanics that
was used for recruiting people to your team.
So it's like, all right everyone's got one target.
But there are a few people out there who's job is destroying
everybody on this opposing faction.
And there's only one person in that opposing
faction right now.
There's only one of me.
But I have this brainwashing mechanic that recruits more
and more people.
So what you thought was one, I'm just against another
individual, becomes my group is against that group.
And it feels pretty awesome, actually.
Because what it actually feels--
it's a weird game mechanic way of making your character have
some sort of development in the game.
If you think about a role-playing game, character
development means your goals now change somehow.
But it's really difficult to give players a means of doing
that themselves.
Brainwashing was one of the few ways that seems to
actually have worked.
I'm actively going to knock out this character, put this
blinky helmet on them for five seconds, and if nobody catches
me in this process I give them new goals.
And the person who's [INAUDIBLE], dude this is way
more exciting than anything [INAUDIBLE].
And you also avoid the metagame problem of loyalty.
It's like, I got this information from this other
group but I've been brainwashed and I don't want
to tell you.
It's like, no you want to tell me now because it'll actually
help you win.
But metagaming in all kinds of live-action
games is a big thing.
You know things about the player or you know things
about the game state that you're not
really supposed to know.
If a person is supposed to be able to teleport from one end
of campus to the other end of campus, the character may be
able to do that.
But the damn player's got to walk all the way in between.
And you have to drive the player halfway to the, I now
know that player is probably on this side of campus.
Even though your character really had no idea how
to deal with that.
That's just one of those--
there are ways to design game mechanics to avoid those
situations.
But in many, many, live-action role playing there is a honor
system that really has to kick in.
The nice thing about it is that if everyone decides to go
by the honor system, and agrees that this honor system
is necessary for the world to be reinforced, it actually
helps reinforce that mutual illusion that
this world is real.
By saying, I know that I'm not supposed to know those things.
But I am going to play this game as hard as I can in a way
that's [INAUDIBLE].
Actually reinforces the world for everybody else.
It's the same for improv theatre.
Anyone here involved in improv theatre or improv comedy?
So, you know yes, and?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
PROFESSOR: What would be the concept behind that?
AUDIENCE: Yes, and, is an idea where if you give someone an
offer they'll take your offer.
So if I say, man we're all out of tomatoes.
Someone will say, yes and the big tomato cook-off is
tomorrow or something like this.
PROFESSOR: You cannot contradict what was said.
AUDIENCE: Not only do you not contradict, you always add
information.
Every line, at least at the beginning of the scene, should
be adding information to the scene.
And then after a few lines you have a very, very, elaborate
set up that's kind of ridiculous.
PROFESSOR: But, mutually shared?
AUDIENCE: Exactly.
PROFESSOR: So, in that same situation.
Metagaming is one of those things that's actively working
to destroy the reality of your world.
And if all the players agree to try their damn hardest to
not let it interfere with the world [INAUDIBLE].
The illusion in a way that it strengthens the scene for
improv theatre.
PROFESSOR: Hold on, just one sec, the other concern that
you had before persuasion issue which was?
AUDIENCE: Characters who, in particular this comes up a lot
in this [INAUDIBLE] type situations or what have you,
where you have somebody's who either a super genius.
AUDIENCE: Oh, so someone who's better than you at something.
AUDIENCE: Much better than you.
How do you mechanic that?
PROFESSOR: The best way that you can do that is to cast the
right person.
But what I have generally found is that old role-playing
game chestnut of separating intelligence from wisdom makes
it a little bit easier.
There's intelligence, which is the ability to think on the
feet, and there's wisdom which is how much you
know about the world.
And you as the game master designing a game can figure
out, when I say someone's really smart, what do I mean?
Intelligence or wisdom?
It helps you a little bit on thinking how I can use game
mechanics or game writing to fix that problem.
So if it's intelligence it's just like, oh I have the
ability to do stuff that other people can't do
because I'm so smart.
And you can literally just give them abilities to act on
things that other people do not have.
I'm able to build a telephone out of this Coke because I'm a
professor of Gilligan's Island.
I'm smart.
It doesn't mean I have to act terribly smart.
I'm capable of doing things that other people can't
because I've been told specifically
I have these abilities.
But that's the intelligence side of it.
The wisdom side of it is a little bit harder.
Which is basically, you dump a whole bunch of
information on somebody.
And you hope that they are capable of making associations
between what's happening in game and what they read.
That's a lot harder.
It is a problem, but I find that by separating those two
it makes it an easier problem.
Patrick?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, this is a bit of a noobish question.
Are LARPs usually played in real time?
PROFESSOR: Typically, they have rules about when to hit
the pause button.
Basically at MIT those are usually enacted when safety
becomes an issue.
People are running too fast.
Somebody just fell down and you want to be able to stop
everyone from running, and so they shout halt.
Typically they're happening in real time because it's really
hard to do turn based stuff that doesn't quickly feel like
a board game.
AUDIENCE: I mean like, when you say someone would want to
do a background check and you'd say I don't know, come
back in two hours.
You'd literally wait two hours?
PROFESSOR: So, yeah, often that really
means just two hours.
And that's an interesting thing of that it's real time
but it's kind of a time delay at the same time.
So as a game master you can build in game mechanics that
take advantage of real time delays to be able to give you
as game master some time to breathe.
Typically they're happening in real time.
I wrote a game where the clock stopped somewhere between
midnight and 8:00 AM.
The game world literally froze, well not literally
figuratively froze, as well.
And one minute after 8:00 the clock would practically, in
game terms, have moved one minute even though there were
eight intervening hours in between so that people could
go and take a break.
Which would be great for an Army of
Darkness type of scenario.
[INAUDIBLE].
But those three films as opposed to it all happened
within 48 hours.
So Andrew?
[INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: So I guess two things, one
is in terms of wisdom.
Could you possibly have little note cards that are flipped
over everywhere?
And then the wisdom person, the person with high wisdom,
could read about information in there?
PROFESSOR: You could certainly have taken advantage of a
piece of paper taped on the wall just put
in the back, right?
Some people can arguably be able to read off the back of
the paper, some people aren't.
Which will be a little bit easier than trying to keep it
all in your head at once.
You can also give very limited wisdom, like the whole psychic
example, right?
I am sensitive in some way.
I can tell when certain things are cursed.
By giving them clues on printed pieces of paper that
nobody else knows how to interpret.
I see there is a number associated with each one of
these rooms.
That number happens to be even.
This is not a place that any sane person would want to be.
And there are people who have the wisdom to tell that and
there are some people who don't.
That's another way to put those environmental clues.
Particularly in MIT, hiding clues in plain sight, and
every single way that you can possibly do
that, is really exploited.
So the numbers for instance.
I've seen games where everyone has five
digits on their badge.
And every single one of those digits means something.
If you happen to have the ability to interpret them, but
each one of the digits means something different.
So that's an example.
AUDIENCE: And just really quickly.
In terms of space, how much space do Assassin's Guild
games take?
PROFESSOR: MIT Assassin's Guild has the advantage of the
MIT campus.
So it can go anywhere from main campus mounted by Mass
Ave. and Main Street, to all over campus.
But players hate that.
Players hate walking all over campus.
It kills their feet.
So often it just turns out to be the few rooms that they
could get room reservations for, the MIT campus activities
complex, and the sort of general vicinity around there.
Outdoors is really not used much, because MIT Assassin's
Guild loves shooting little plastic things at each other.
And when the wind blows that just sucks.
Jeremy?
AUDIENCE: Do those eight story [INAUDIBLE]
games that have gone way horribly, fallen apart.
PROFESSOR: Oh, absolutely.
How much time have we got?
AUDIENCE: Can you highlight what are the mistakes that
have made--
everyone who's doing these, especially on my team, they're
all smart people.
And they're written by smart people.
So what hazard mistakes do smart people still make that
results in these games falling apart?
Or bad things happen?
PROFESSOR: Well, the most common thing that happens is
not even an issue of how smart the game writers were but how
much experience they've had in seeing
things go horribly wrong.
AUDIENCE: Right, which is why I'm asking.
PROFESSOR: Just like this class has given you experience
making games, you've seen how some projects can go wrong.
A lot of it is just system dynamics, right?
I put together a bunch of rules.
I didn't expect those rules to interact in that way.
But because a live-action game is difficult to run multiple
times, the first time you see--
AUDIENCE: How do you play a live-action game
that lasts to a month?
PROFESSOR: That actually came up in the forums I believe.
Somebody was asking about this.
You can at best to a test--
AUDIENCE: Give them mechanics?
PROFESSOR: --You can play the sort of game mechanics.
Write down the stripped down version which takes out all of
the plot motivations and just has the combat.
This is how combat plays.
I did that for a Matrix game once.
And it's like, I'm writing a game of a Matrix.
Combat is really freaking important.
So I just made an entire game where all it was, you want to
go in and get this thing and get out.
That was the whole rule.
And here's your three pages of contact notes.
And people were like holy shit,
this is a lot to remember.
And that showed me the problems that I had.
Unfortunately, it wasn't so catastrophic that I would use
it as a catastrophic game example.
AUDIENCE: Tell us about a catastrophic.
PROFESSOR: Catastrophic game examples.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Tell us someone tripped and hurt themselves.
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: No, that's not what you're looking for I
understand.
It was a game where everyone was playing undead.
I think they were vampires.
So they could get knocked down if they got shot, and they
would get up again in five minutes
because they were immortal.
Unless they got staked or something they
would get up again.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of vampires in the game.
Often many of them were in different factions.
So they were going after each other with guns.
So when two people who were obviously against each other
shot each other, fell over, they would get up in five
minutes and shoot each other again.
Repeatedly begging for someone to show up and do something to
break this deadlock.
And that's one of those things where it's like game
mechanically you know what's supposed to
happen, and it sucks.
So that's one example.
AUDIENCE: Do we have to wait five minutes?
Can we just continue to shoot each other?
PROFESSOR: But the issue is, again, these games are
happening in real time.
So the five minute rule is there possibly for a reason.
While you are down for five minutes those five minutes
become very valuable for someone who wants you down for
those five minutes.
You can kill me.
I can kill you.
But both of us can knock each other down for five minutes.
And that's a great delaying tactic.
And I can send one of my friends and do something that
I don't want you interfering with.
And if that's the case then that's great.
But often it was just, oh crap there's no way
to break the deadlock.
AUDIENCE: You'd figure the limiting factor would be
ammunition though.
PROFESSOR: I think that game actually let you pick up your
ammunition all you want.
Because it can be a really annoying limitation to run out
of ammunition.
Especially if you are playing with the little rubber dart
guns because carrying a whole pile of
them is really annoying.
So if the rule is, I get to pick them up, then you have
the allusion of having a lot of ammunition without having
to carry a lot of ammunition.
So that's one example of a catastrophic failure.
There's a really funny quote regarding brainwashing
actually, which is where were you?
I was not being brainwashed.
Who were you with?
Not with the people who were brainwashing me.
Back to the problem with the persuasion, right?
It's like, I want to tell you something because my goals
haven't changed far enough to want to align
me to my new goals.
So I'm going to do everything that I can without
breaking the rules.
I'm not allowed to tell you that I was being brainwashed.
So I can say that I wasn't being brainwashed.
Other catastrophic?
How long do you think the thing will take probably?
GUEST SPEAKER: I don't know.
Probably about as long as a game of Mafia.
PROFESSOR: OK, so like half an hour?
GUEST SPEAKER: Depends on the people.
AUDIENCE: If you put a time limit on discussions then,
because I've played in the past where it's lasted hours.
Because there's no cap and people just went into these
long discussions in between rounds.
So if you put a cap like OK, it's going to be this long a
discussion and then we're going to kill someone off.
PROFESSOR: Let's see, I had wanted to read.
AUDIENCE: Played online Mafia?
It's a totally different experience.
PROFESSOR: Chat involved or something?
AUDIENCE: Forums usually.
So basically, when you can look at the history of what
people have said and who they've accused and what order
they did it in, it completely changes how
Mafia turns out, right?
Because all of a sudden, people start going, back in
the history and compiling statistics [INAUDIBLE].
And who said what and then who must be on their side if
that's the case.
But there's this kind of meta knowledge that you can use
with this if you are Mafia because you can tell
[INAUDIBLE].
We were able to communicate at the Mafia privately.
That meant we could for instance do things like, make
sure we were never the first people to accuse anyone.
So that's a Mafia truth, never do that.
Because it immediately makes you look suspicious later on
if somebody turns out to be the Mafia.
There's no way that you can be the first person who accuses.
But bandwagoning somebody who's not in the Mafia is
always great.
So you can coordinate to do the sort of thing to try and
defeat the statistical analysis that
somebody else is doing.
PROFESSOR: You've got this whole
shadow governance theory.
AUDIENCE: That's a great [INAUDIBLE] tactic to try and
get you away from my team is to actually accuse
someone on your team.
And hope that they don't actually vote them off.
I've definitely been in a game where we purposely killed off
one of the people on our team just so that
we wouldn't be accused.
Oh, he cannot be on Mafia because he killed off a Mafia.
OK, and then we end up winning because no one
figured that out.
PROFESSOR: I mean, that's one of the best things about all
kinds of live-action games is that it almost encourages
people to look for these slightly
out of the box illusions.
These sort of emergent I'm not really going to expect that
but it still fits within the rules.
Because we are dealing with real people for the most part
and you're not limited to the cards you're allowed to play
or the turns you're allowed to take.
So taking advantage of that.
I have one more disaster story.
AUDIENCE: I want to hear it.
PROFESSOR: I'll limit it to just one for
the people who don't.
This was a game where there was a
virus that was spreading.
People who are in Assassin's Guild might have
already heard this one.
The whole basic idea is that there was a explosive
nano-virus.
People who got infected after a certain amount of time would
explode and anybody in the room with them
would now be infected.
Of course this was a game--
a game set in science fiction kind of thing--
and we've got doctors who are capable.
Who have mechanics to be able to research cures.
However when the doctor happened to be one of the
first people to die, what rapidly happens is that what
should have been a one night game turned out to be a one
hour game and everybody exploded.
I guess that might come down to feasibility.
But you can think about it as you need a certain amount of
redundancy when you're designing any game, but
particularly live-actions games.
Because shit happens.
And you've got to expect that to happen.
There's always this fear about, oh I put in too many
resources into this game and the players are going to find
it too easy.
And more often than not, yeah, there's some players that that
are going to say we breezed through that.
But, rarely do people get terribly upset in a
live-action game when something is really too easy.
They get really upset when it comes to the end and it seems
to be impossible.
Oh, so the GMs only made it possible for one person to fix
this problem?
And they didn't think about that person just dying in the
beginning of the game?
So that was another example.
That [INAUDIBLE], I'm sorry.
I feel really bad about bringing up examples from my
games, but I don't know which ones are the ones that I
genuinely--
Oh, I do have one more.
So, this was after The Sims came out.
And people should really be worried about that.
I thought having a bladder stat would be a really good
idea for a game.
This was a game that was set in a train
that was steam pumped.
So tea was the game.
Tea was in fact the combat drug.
If you drank tea, your combat status would increase but so
would your bladder stat.
Once your bladder stat was passed a certain point all
your combat stats went down and you really had to go to
the restroom.
Which was really interesting, most people just
reviled that game.
Because there was one more number they had to hit that
was stupid annoying and really didn't do terribly much for
the immersion of the game.
I was thinking, it's a game about travelling on the train.
So you use the restroom all the time.
That's the only thing I do when I'm travelling.
I use the restroom.
[INAUDIBLE].
But that led to some interesting emergent
situations.
Because when this train gets attacked, and everybody needs
to find a safe place to hide, what they all do is they head
into the washroom, barricade it, and drink tea until all
their combat stats go out the roof and then win the fight.
Because they were right there in the restroom they could
afford to do that.
It was hilarious.
AUDIENCE: Some of these people come up with exploits.
PROFESSOR: They may hate the rules, but once they
understand how the systems work they're going to come up
with ways to use it to their advantage.
And that can be some of the most enjoyable moments.
AUDIENCE: I saw a squirrel this past weekend, and he
figured out if he stood under a bird feeding thing up in the
tree it could just get free food because when the birds
ate it once every two to three minutes they would drop a
grain inevitably.
And there was this really fat squirrel just sitting there.
He spent the entire day sitting right [INAUDIBLE].
So it's like it's so natural to try and find exploits of
everything and work it to your advantage.
PROFESSOR: There is a moral--
AUDIENCE: It doesn't work for [INAUDIBLE] but
you still do it anyway.
PROFESSOR: There is a moral to that.
Is that the live-action games, especially if you're playing
in the live-action game community, there is whatever
you write down as a rule we put it up on the wall and they
put it on a piece of paper.
Someone's going to try to do it.
And you have to think of, I'm going to put in a rule that's
so ridiculous that people are not going to want to try and
do it because it's going to hurt them or something.
Like jump on this spot 100 times and you
will unlock this door.
Or you could find someone with lock picking, and you'll just
assume that person's going to find
someone with lock picking.
No, someone's going to jump on the spot 100 times and they're
going to hate you for it because you
put the rule in there.
So try not to hurt your players, would be the moral,
because they will do what you tell them to do.
AUDIENCE: Do you guys sign disclosure forms?
PROFESSOR: All right, that's a [INAUDIBLE].
GUEST SPEAKER: Before we go, I want to just clarify this
version of the investigation mechanic.
So, the group of scientists gets to test two people.
If you catch the thing then they're dead and out.
If you catch them on the second time-- this is what
I've read-- if you catch them on second guess you get
another guess.
I'm not sure if that means you can have
infinite guesses or not.
So that's something to play around with.
AUDIENCE: If you test the wrong person who's not the
thing they don't die?
GUEST SPEAKER: No.
AUDIENCE: So I test someone the first time, they're the
thing, then they're out.
But I test someone the second time, regardless of whether or
not I tested a thing the first time.
GUEST SPEAKER: Yes.
So you always get at least two guesses.
AUDIENCE: But if you test someone on the second
one they don't die?
GUEST SPEAKER: If they're the thing they're dead.
AUDIENCE: The thing dies.
If you test someone on the first time and they're the
thing you don't get an extra guess?
AUDIENCE: Well, not necessarily.
GUEST SPEAKER: You get two.
AUDIENCE: You always get two.
AUDIENCE: So if you guess any time [INAUDIBLE]
but if you guess a thing and then not a
thing you get a player.
AUDIENCE: I think you can catch the
thing really quickly.
AUDIENCE: I think you can catch the thing without
actually doing anything sort of like making a system where
you automatically catch the thing.
You're getting two guesses so in the ratio of randomly
guessing you'll--
GUEST SPEAKER: And you can certainly change it right?
This is just what I've found.
And it seemed like an interesting thing, the whole
point of the part was.
AUDIENCE: Which thing do you start with?
AUDIENCE: No, you're not [INAUDIBLE].
Because as I recall you would infect someone first.
AUDIENCE: Because you're going to have two unprescribed.
AUDIENCE: This seems really like biased towards
non-infected.
AUDIENCE: Well we'll find out.