Games Britannia

In this 3 part series, Benjamin Woolley talks to us about the history of board games, and games in today's society.

Part 1

During the first part of Games Britannia, Woolley talks about 3 ancient games in particular: The Stanway game, Alea Evangeli and Gyan Chaupar.

The Stanway game - This game is considered to be the oldest game in British history. The games rules are completely unknown, as no rule set has ever been found for the game, but it seem to be laid out in a way similar to a game like Chess. Plus, the game was found with no dice or similar instrument so it implies a game of strategy rather than luck. The game was considered to be halfway through when found, as none of the pieces positions seem to correlate with each other. The game-board consists of  8 x 12 squares.

Alea Evangeli - Another old strategy game with similar aspects to Chess. The board consists of 19 x 19 squares. One players starts with 25 pieces, 24 regular pieces and 1 king, arranged in a starting formation in the middle of the board. The other players starts with 48 regular pieces arranged around the middle of the board in a particular pattern. The objective of the game is for one player to get the king to any corner of the board, while the other player has to try and capture the king.

Gyan Chaupar - Gyan Chaupar, or the Game of Knowledge, is the spiritual predecessor to the game Snakes and Ladders. Unlike the rather plain Snakes and Ladders however, Gyan Chaupar was meant to have great spiritual meaning, with each square being a step along the path to Enlightenment.

Part 2

In part 2, Woolley talks about more Modern games. He talks about how Monopoly, Scrabble and Cluedo are the most popular games in households to this date, as well as noting that Monopoly was actually inspired from a socialist game called "The Landlords Game".

Woolley also talks about the advancement of board games into full-blown adventures, primarily RPG's like Dungeons and Dragons. Compared to a game like Monopoly, D&D is extremely complicated and games can easily stretch into a length of days, usually resulting in the game being played in chunks over a period of time.

Part 3

In the final part of Games Britannia, Woolley makes the transition from board game to digital game. He starts off with the first step into digital games in the 80's, from simple arcade games like Pac-man, to Elite, a space sim.

He then advances to the first introduction into a 3D digital world, like Tomb Raider or, to put my own personal favourite game into the mix, Populous - The Beginning.

He completes the final episode by talking about the final and most recent forms of digital gaming. He mentions games like GTA, which can be considered morally very bad games and potentially bad influences on a generation, and games like World of Warcraft, which allow thousands of players to interact with each other in one huge, breath taking world.


My opinion of the Games Britannia series is very positive. While i was initially skeptical about watching several hours dedicated to old board games, i found the experience very interesting, even going so far as playing several of the games after watching them, with Alea Evangelii being a particular favourite of mine. All in all, i found the series enjoyable and would recommend any games designer, or anyone interested in games, to watch it.

Gender in Games

After looking at the 2009 National Gamers Survey, it surprised me to see that, on average, females off all ranges played games almost, if not equal to the amount of males, though males do play games a lot more hours a week on average than females, with males between the 13 - 19 age range playing almost 3 times the hours a week. Also, while females played more games on games portals like Kongregate more than males, females on the PC and MMO's were significantly less than males.

I think the biggest reason for a decreased female percentage in more "hardcore" gaming is that most triple A games are more suited for the male gender. To quote from Brandii Grace in an interview with Ernest Adams, "I wouldn't say there's something "wrong" with the triple-A games on the market today. Rather, I'd say they are like a man's best, custom-tailored suit -- a perfect fit for the intended audience and a poor fit for most women".

Looking at the majority of triple A games over the years, admittedly, they do follow a general theme of killing. Whether it's diving behind walls and popping your enemy with a gun, or jumping off a roof and assassinating your target with a blade, the theme of killing is highly used in the most popular video games.
Though, if what Brandii Grace says is true, games would appeal more to women if the emotional content inside them was higher. While i can't say that some high end games wouln't benefit from more bonding with the characters you play as, i can't see a game like Call of Duty becoming better by introducing more emotions into the gameplay.

Personally, i see nothing wrong with attempting to create more games suited towards the female gender, or games that appeal to both. I wouldn't even mind more emotional games, i'm not heartless after all! However i don't think this should come at the cost of losing current gamers because of it, as regardless to any argument, males do play more games than females.

Narrative in Games

While some people argue that Games are all about playing and narrative should take a backseat in favor of better mechanics and dynamics, I think it's perfectly acceptable to expect both in a good game.

Take a game like Portal. Would it have been nearly as successful if the narratives of the game had been pushed back to work on gameplay? Of course not. While the levels mechanics work smoothly and is extremely well designed, the game doesn't do this by pushing back on narrative.

However, while the narrative in Portal is reasonably simple, other games take a more Hollywood road with their narratives. Games like Call of Duty focus on a more gritty explosion-fest , usually with little-to-no stop in dramatic narrative.

Of course, some games do not need almost any narrative to remain successful. Games like Team Fortress 2, with the exception of Valves trailers for the characters inside it, have little narrative and yet remain highly popular.

Royal Game of Ur - Essay

The Royal Game of Ur

Introduction to the Royal Game of Ur

Found by Leonard Woolley, the original board of the Royal Game of Ur consisted of 2 square sections connected by a single line of 2 squares, the squares being 3 x 3 and 3 x 2 in size, and was dated back to around 3000BC.

 The objective is to get your pieces onto the board and move them to the end square (Movement shown in the diagram). Depending on the version, there would be 5 or 7 pieces on each team. The players would throw 4 tetrahedral dice, with each dice being marked on 2 of its corners. Players would then move a counter equal to the amount of face up marked corners. Friendly pieces could not be on the same square, and if a piece moved onto an enemy’s piece, the enemy’s piece would be removed off the board and would have to re-enter from the start. 

Landing on certain squares would make you safe from capture and would grant additional rolls (Known as rosette squares). Also, the first four squares upon entry are also safe, as only one player has access to each particular side of the board. The Egyptians played a similar version of the game, but with a different board (see image 2). The safe squares remained in the same places, but the larger square is straightened out, allowing more chances for pieces to be taken (R.C.Bell, Board and Table Games, p23 – 25).

Gameplay

To get a feel of the game before we iterated it, we played through the game several times (We played the Egyptian version with 7 pieces each). After 2 hours of playing, we noted several things about the gameplay.

Firstly, there was a lack of choice, with the most common difficult choice in the game being whether to take an enemy’s piece or land on a rosette square and get another roll, hoping to get either another 4 or a roll that could capture an enemy’s piece.

Secondly, the game generally rewards players who are lucky. When a 4 is rolled, the player can usually either get a piece onto the board straight onto a rosette square, granting another go and an increased chance of capturing an enemy’s piece. This is an example of a positive feedback loop, albeit a very small one. A positive feedback loop rewards players who are doing the best. In this case, it rewards the player with the most helpful roll, and will more likely move them closer to winning the game. This also helped you in getting past the “choke zone”.

Thirdly, the more pieces you got to the end of the board, the harder it is to get the rest of them off, as the other player will have more chances to capture them. The opposite of a positive feedback loop, a negative feedback loop is used to hinder players who are winning, or help players who are losing, in this case, making it harder for the winning player to get their remaining pieces off the board. While overuse of a negative feedback loop usually makes a game very long, in this game, the loop is quite well balanced. The “losing” player (The player with more pieces remaining) still has a good chance of catching up to the “winning” player by having more chances to capture their pieces, while the “winning” player still has more chance of winning in the long run because they will eventually roll a set of results that will get their remaining pieces past the “choke zone” (see Appendix 1 for link and details).

Speaking of that, the “choke zone” refers to the first four squares on the board where pieces can be taken (see image). As, on average, you would roll a 2 or a 3, your pieces are almost guaranteed to end up in the marked area. Not only did this make it easy for your opponent to capture your pieces, it then made it easy to capture your opponent’s piece right back again. The only easy way to escape was either to jump from rosette square to rosette squares, or get lucky with the rolls.

To conclude my first experiences with the game, while I’m not a huge fan of games that base their mechanics on luck, I did find myself enjoying the game immensely for a reason that can be summed up in one word. Schadenfreude, which is the German word for “to gloat over the misfortune of a rival” (Nicole Lazzaro, Why We Play Games, pg 6). There is nothing more satisfying that rolling 3 4’s in a row, getting 2 pieces off the board to safety and capturing an enemy’s piece in the process. Admittedly, this occurrence didn’t happen very often, but there were still several moments when you couldn’t help but feel a twinge of savage glee as you took your opponents piece that was one space away from safety.

Iterating the Royal Game of Ur

To start the iteration process, we first had to choose the mechanics we wanted to focus on and tweak. While I’m not a fan of luck based games, we decided to leave this mechanic alone, as it was the luck mechanic that provided most of the emotion to the game. However, we played one game where my opponent only had 1 piece left and I had 4, and I went on to win by getting almost perfect rolls. Because of this, we wanted to add more skill to the game, or at least add more choices. (See Appendix 2 Paragraph – The Downside to Luck).

1^st iteration: Bearing in mind that we thought the main mechanics were balanced enough to not require any massive changes, for our first iteration, we decided to remove the rule that didn’t allow friendly pieces to occupy the same square. Also, when two pieces occupy the same square, the two pieces become linked and have to move together. If a player gets the pieces to the end, then they both exit the board. If an enemy piece lands on the set of counters, then they both get removed off the board.

The idea behind this iteration was to introduce a higher risk/reward mechanic. In theory, this adds more choices for the player to make, increasing the skill factor of the game, as well as making the game more Narrative, which describes the drama aesthetic of the game. This means the game should have more tense moments and increase the excitement (Robin Hunicke, MDA: A formal approach to game design, pg 2).

Results: After playing with the new iteration a few times, we concluded that the game, while it still relied on luck, was slightly more strategic and provided several very tense moments. It also meant holding onto the rosette squares was even more important, as you could safely hold 2 pieces on them until they are safe to move. However, if a 2 pieces movement was misjudged, it could easily result in losing both your pieces back to the start.

2^nd iteration: For the second iteration, we decided to add a new mechanic, rather than tweak an old one. As the previous iteration added a more skill-based mechanic, and we wanted to keep the original balance of skill and luck, we added in the mechanic of trap squares. Trap squares are located every 2 squares after a rosette square, with the exception of the first 4 squares (Locations in image below).

When a piece lands on a trap square, the player must draw a trap card and obey the effect written on the card. The majority of the effects are negative, like moving pieces back, but there are several good effects as well. If a trap effect causes a piece to land on another trap square, then another trap card is drawn. If a trap effect causes a piece to land on a rosette square, you do not get another roll, but the piece is safe on the square.

The idea behind this iteration was to add a mechanic similar to the rosette squares, but would be more likely to hinder the player rather than help them. It also adds to the Challenge aesthetic of the game, as it adds a clear obstacle that potentially hinders the player’s path to the end. (Robin Hunicke, MDA: A formal approach to game design, pg 2).

Results: After a couple of playtests, we came to the following conclusion. Landing on a trap square is usually intentional, unless another trap square moved you onto one. The act of landing on a trap square is less luck based whereas the effect of the trap is completely luck based. While the effect will more often be bad than good, when the effect is good, it can really pay off, hence this adds to both the Narrative and the Challenge aesthetics, as well as the Sensation aesthetic (The sensation aesthetic describing the pleasure of the game). However, for the majority of the time, the game was slowed down even further, and didn’t have as much of an impact as originally thought.

Conclusion

The Royal Game of Ur was a lot harder to iterate than it originally seemed, mostly due to the game being well balanced to begin with. While the gameplay revolves around luck, there is still enough skill based gameplay to provide a good game filled with moments that will make you grin with satisfaction and other moments that will make you pull your hair out.

Appendix

Appendix 1: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3017/designers_notebook_positive_.php

Appendix 2: http://phoffstein.wordpress.com/essays/luck-and-skill/

Appendix 3: Nicole Lazzaro, Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without story, March 8, 2004.

Appendix 4: Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, MDA: A formal approach to games design and game research, 2004.

Remediation

Remediation in media is the using or representing of one or multiple types of media to form one type of media.

Immediacy - The first way media re-mediates old media. This is where the focus is on realism, and attempts to draw the person into the world pictured or displayed. The interface of the media should be "transparent" and hidden from the person, so it does not interfere with the interaction of the media itself.

Hypermediacy - The second way media re-mediates old media. The opposite of Immediacy, the media draws the user towards the interface rather than away from it. While Immediacy focuses on imagery, Hypermediacy focuses on the HUD, referencing to things outside of itself.

Paidea & Ludus - The 4 Types of Games

These terms are from the book  Les jeux et les hommes by Roger Caillois.

Paidea - Games that are generally have a lot less rules which the player is bound by, and ,as the majority of Paidea games lack a proper ending, the player can set their own goals or objectives.

A good example of a Paidea game is Minecraft, a sandbox construction game. While Minecraft does have a set of rules the player must follow, their is no specific end goal inside the game: the player must set their own goals. For example, the player can choose to collect materials to build a really tall house made of dirt or the player can use these materials to obtain rarer materials and create better tools and armour.

Ludus - Games that have a lot of rules and will generally have one outcome or goal at the end of it. 

A good example of a Paidea game is Supreme Commander, a real time strategy. The end game of each battle of Supreme Commander is the same, destroying your opponent, though there are multiple ways of accomplishing this. As there are way more rules than Minecraft, Supreme Commander is a lot linear, and the player cannot really create their own goals.

On top of these 2 definitions, Caillois came up with 4 other words to describe other parts of games.

Agon - Competitive. An example of a competitive game would be Call of Duty, more specifically its multiplayer, where you are pitted against multiple other players (possibly in teams) and must kill enemy players.

Alea - Chance. A good example of a game with Alea is FTL - Faster Than Light. The game has you control a spaceship through a group of star systems, each filled with random encounters and battles.

Mimicry - Role Playing. An example would be Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic, where the player takes control as a Jedi fighting a war against an army of Siths.

Ilinx - Altering perspective. An example would be Anti-Chamber, a game set in a Escher-like world, where the player can get extremely lost or stuck in seemingly endless corridors and pathways, as well as solving logic puzzles.

Old/New Games Journalism

In this lecture, we had to read an example of Old and New Games Journalism and decided which form of journalism was more interesting and/or useful for reviewing and discussing games.

Old Games Journalism focuses on a detailed description on the mechanics and technical side of the game, almost, if not completely, removing any personal experience of the game, and instead focusing on components like gameplay and graphics. These types of articles are commonly found on review websites for games, a good example being IGN. These reviews focus on telling the reader what to expect in the game, without giving too much away about the general plot or unlocks inside the game.

For New Games Journalism, i read the article always_black by Ian Shanahan (Sept 2003) “Bow, Nigger”.
In this article, Shanahan talks about  his experience in the MMORPG, Star Wars: Jedi Knight II. Rather than going into massive detail about the games mechanics and his thoughts on them, he goes more into his personal experience with the games dynamics and gameplay. He says that at the start of each duel, players bow to one another, like the old Jedi's themselves, even though the games creators did not make this a mechanic, the players adopted themselves. His accounts focuses on one particular duel where another player abuses this adopted system to score free hits on his character. Following this, he gets into a very passionate and emotional description of the following events, resulting in him winning the duel and saying that good won against evil.

Generally, while i find Old Games Journalism to be more useful to find out information about a game i potentially want to buy, New Games Journalism is certainly more interesting and engrossing to read as it provides a personal account rather than a impersonal one.

Le Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim) - Game of Assasin

Le Decima Vittima is a film based on an "alternative future" where people can enter a competition where the objective is to assassinate your given victim without being assassinated yourself. While assassinating your target or counter assassinating your assassin is treated as normal, if you assassinate the wrong person, you will be put in jail (As per regular murder laws in these times).

The film follows 2 characters. Marcello Poletti, and the person who is trying to assassinate him, Caroline Meredith. As the film progresses, they gradually fall in love, with Caroline being conflicted whether she should kill him or not, and Marcello wondering if she is his assassin or not.

As the film was made in 1965, the graphics are obviously not up to par with today's visuals. However, this is one of the few flaws i found with the film. For me, the film was a great watch, if only because of the amount of moments that i found extremely amusing. For example, at one point, Caroline decided to transport a sleeping Marcello in a tent onto a truck using a giant crane, so she can assassinate him for a TV commercial. The sheer impracticality, and the fact he somehow didn't wake up during it, just added to the general amusement of the whole film.

On a related note,  this film has been adapted to be played in real life, commonly referred to as Assassin or Killer. The principle is exactly the same, though instead of real weapons, various non-lethal objects must be used to "murder" your target, like Nerf guns and wooden spoons.

After finding out about this, I arranged for a group of people on the course to take part in a game. After setting the general rules of the game, as well as what weapons would be allowed, I got my friend to assign each player with a starting target, and if they assassinated this target, they would obtain their target for their next assassination. The last person standing would be the winner.

The game took just over 2 weeks to finish, with a total of 11 people lying dead in various places, with the final winner being none other than myself. The majority of the people were assassinated within the first week of the game, with only 5 people making it to the second week.

All in all, it was great fun and I am currently in the process of creating another round of Assassin as i write this.

Bibliography

Here is a lovely example of a bibliography using the Harvard method.

Two full-length books.

Braithwaite, B., Schreiber, I, (2009), Challenges for Game Designers, Cencage Learning, Stamford.

Murray, H. J. R. (1952) A History of Board Games Other Than Chess. Oxford. Clarendon Press.

Two contributions to books.

Salen, K. (2002) 'Telefragging Monster Movies.'  In King, L., (ed.), Game On: The History and Culture of Video Games. London: Laurence King. pg 98-111.

Bittanti, M. (2003) 'The Technoludic Film: Images of Videogames in Movies' In Nakatsu and Hoshino.,Entertainment Computing: Technologies and Applications. Springer. pg 307-312

Two journal entries.

Keighron, P. (1993) 'Video Diaries: What’s Up Doc?' Sight and Sound. October. pg 24-25.

Wei, H., Bizzocchi, J. and Calvert, T. (2010) 'Time and Space in Digital Game Storytelling', International Journal of Computer Games Technology 2010. pg 1-23