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Finally! An Interesting Endgame Condition
Posted on | February 2, 2009 | No Comments
I have spent the last week making lists of gameplay elements, diagramming resource flows, and knitting my brows about the flow of a GeekStack game, but every time, the last slot was still blank. How do you win? What’s the scienfitic equivalent of killing your opponent? What endgame goal makes sense with this theme?
I tried all of the obvious ones but they all had either thematic or gameplay problems. Killing your opponent is a tried and true gameplay goal, but with a theme as positive and constructive as science and discovery, it didn’t make sense. Achieving some goal before your opponent worked thematically but didn’t provide enough interaction to be a compelling game. It was just two-man solitaire. In all the other games, your overall goal is to affect your opponent’s resource (life or damage). Focusing on your own resource seemed to inward facing.
But today I had a eureka moment. (Aside: for everyone who thinks that eureka moments are a shortcut to discovery, quit kidding yourself. You can only have them if you’ve filled your head to overflowing with the problem you’re working on. For a long time. Just so you know, this endgame problem has been haunting me for a week. I’ve dreamed about cardgames 5 times in the last 5 days. I skipped a day but had two separate dreames one night after my baby woke me up. Eureka is the prize for dogged perserverance.) You’re competing for fame, public attention, public awareness, or something like that. Your achievements earn you points and the first one to a total (probably 20) wins.
But how’s that different from the solitaire I described earlier? Since the point of the game is to promote science literacy, it’s operating in a world where there’s a limited public attention span for science! You need 20 points to win, but there are only 30 points available in the world at the start of the game and you and your opponent draw from the same pool. Genius!
For those who don’t read 50-100 pages of game design theory and history a day, let me explain some of the reasons why this will make for a great game:
- No game that I know of does this, so it should lead to interesting new strategies.
- You have to make steady progress. You can go for big wins but a quick opponent can beat you despite the limited resource if you’re too slow.
- This resource can be affected like a player’s resource can. So media or government actions could increase the total fame pool, or anti-science measures could reduce it, making it easier or harder for both players to be close to winning.
- Since the public pool can run out of points, the game can switch to zero sum play, where you have to take something away from your opponent to win, rather than just improve yourself (if a new discovery is made but everyone is watching American Idol, should there be any reward?)
- Cards could have an “exactly X points” vs “up to X points”, preventing big effects if there’s not enough public interest for them (think of the scuttled Superconducting Super Collider) while limiting the bang of others.
I think these and other reasons make the “public interest pool” a rich design resource that opens up a lot of possibilities, both in gameplay mechanics and theme. And all this time I was just shooting for “good enough”.
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