Team 11: Alex Lee, Jiwon Lee, Dylan Ly, Kaitlin Peng
Artist’s Statement
Our idea began from a simple question: how can we turn Beer Pong, a classic drinking game, into a game that brings people closer together more intentionally? Beer Pong, when played in its standard format is fun, but that fun is really only brought about by the act of making a ball into a cup and drinking alcohol. How can we take this fun mechanic (as well as the drinking aspect, which can certainly help with bringing people closer together) and elevate the game to something entirely different, one in which there are more intimate interactions between players? This initial idea, through experimentation and several different iterations, eventually brought us to the final version of our game — Closer with Every Shot!
In this game, we combine the fun and familiar mechanics of Beer Pong with partner-based challenges that aim to break the ice between partners and create meaningful interactions that give players the opportunity to connect deeper with the people they play with. Along the way as you play, there might be moments of laughter, uncertainty, intimacy, and maybe even a little discomfort as you think about how vulnerable you are willing to be. Ultimately, we hope that this game is fun and will create or deepen your connections with the people you play with!
Concept Map
Initial Decisions
For the first iteration of our game, we took the basic skeleton of Beer Pong, modified it to have each player have their own mini-pyramid of cups (with it still being 2 vs. 2), and added in the element of having to draw a card with an embarrassing question on it and answering it whenever a ball was made into one of your cups. With this initial idea, our formal elements were as follows:
- Players: 4 players, Team vs Team with 2 players on each team.
- Objectives: Eliminate all of the cups of the 2 players on the opposing team.
- Outcomes: Zero sum — one team wins, the other loses.
- Procedures/Rules: Each team member has an opportunity to shoot one ball per turn into the cups of the other team members. If person A makes a ball into person B’s cup, then person B must draw a card with an embarrassing question on it, answer it, and remove that cup. This continues until all cups of a team have been removed.
- Resources: Cups, ping pong balls, a table/elevated surface, and pre-written card set.
- Boundaries: Edges of the table/elevated surface.
Testing and Iteration History
Iteration/Playtest 1
The main question we sought to answer with our initial prototype was to see if people would enjoy the added element of intimacy through question-answering in the context of Beer Pong.
After playtesting this twice with other students in the class, we realized that we needed to make some major changes if we wanted to make the game playable and enjoyable. The first thing we realized through our initial playtests was that we did not think critically enough about our target audience — do we want to cater this game towards people who are already good friends, or strangers? When we playtested with students from the class who did not know each other very well, we found that because we were not very intentional about building an intimacy curve, people had a hard time wanting to answer certain questions that were too embarrassing right off the bat. Since we had not thought of including some mechanic to opt out of answering the question, we had to freestyle on the spot to bend the rules and allow people to not answer.
Additionally, we noticed that there was no real purpose in the game being 2v2 or having teams at all — in fact, the team mechanic actually prevented partners on a team from directly getting to know each other better, since you could only target the cups on the other side of the table.
Finally, we realized that our game was treading too close to an already existing game called Fear Pong, which we wanted to differentiate our game from. So to improve our game, major modifications were necessary.
Iteration/Playtest 2
From the takeaways of the playtests of the first iteration, there were four things we knew we wanted to solidify and make more intentional decisions about: 1) the target audience, 2) the intimacy curve, 3) the team dynamics, and 4) the mechanism of opting out.
We decided as a group that we wanted to cater our game towards people who might be strangers or acquaintances but want to get to know each other better. To do so, we needed to incorporate an intimacy curve to the questions so that they start off being easier for strangers to answer, and as they get more comfortable with each other, the questions get harder and harder. We formalized this with creating 3 different levels of cards — Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 — where they get increasingly more difficult to answer.
To create more purpose behind there being a team, we decided to get rid of the individual mini-pyramid idea and go back to the original 4-3-2-1 team formation of Beer Pong, and we would have teams draw one question card as one unit whenever a ball was made into their cup formation, rather than having individuals on a team draw one card. The question would then apply to both of the members on the team, and they would collectively have to decide whether to both answer the question or both opt out. Additionally, we introduced the idea of Partner Cards, where in order for a team to gain the opportunity to shoot balls in a turn, they would first have to draw a Partner Card and complete an ice-breaker type challenge written on it. This would allow partners on a team to get to know each other better through these ice-breakers. To differentiate between the Partner Card and the cards with the embarrassing questions written on them, we named the embarrassing question cards as Challenge Cards.
Lastly, we wanted to solidify the previously hand-wavey mechanism of opting out of a question or challenge by allowing them to have that option at any point, but there being an incentive to answer them so that the social interactions are encouraged. We implemented this by creating a point system where the Level 1, 2, and 3 Challenge Cards are associated with point values that are equal to their level. If a team pulls a card that they do not want to answer, they must give the card to the opposing team, who gains those points to their score. At the end of the rounds, whichever team has the highest number of points wins. To incentivize Partner Cards, we made it such that players will have to skip their turn to shoot a ball if they do not complete the card.
With these modifications, we playtested once again in class with other students. This time, the playtest went much better — we found a lot of success with the Partner Card ice-breakers, for which players who were not particularly close yet had fun doing. The scaling of the levels of the Challenge Cards helped get the ball rolling with completing Challenge Cards since the barrier of entry for answering the questions was intentionally lower at the beginning with the Level 1s. However, a new interesting finding from this playtest based on the feedback of the players was that there was no incentive for the players to tell the truth for certain questions, and they could easily just lie or give half truths to avoid having to give up their card. This became the focus of our next and final iteration.
Iteration/Playtest 3
To combat the problem of being able to lie to get out of truthfully answering the questions on the Challenge Cards, we decided that we should get rid of questions that don’t involve the people that are currently in the same room or are playing the game (a question that does involve the surrounding people might be: FMK the other three players of the game?). In place of these questions, we decided to shift the Challenge Cards to be more of actual challenges that players must complete that does not necessarily involve telling some sort of truth. For example: “Take a selfie with your partner and post it on your Instagram/Facebook story.”
This would eliminate the possibility of being able to simply tell a lie to avoid giving up a Challenge card to the other team. This is particularly important because the mechanism of scoring points is reliant on the other team not wanting to complete a challenge and giving up their Challenge Card to the other team, and this change would create more interesting and more genuinely difficult dilemmas for the players. With this in mind, we finalized our game, and ran our final playtest with our group members. We all had a fun time playing the game, and we all agreed that we could see ourselves playing this again in the future. The link to the video of our final playtest can be found below.
Video of Final Playtest
Final Prototype
Game Shape
Box Front & Back
PDF of the box design can be found here.
Print-n-Play Cards
PDF of the print-n-play cards can be found here (examples of the sheets are shown below).
Rulebook
PDF of the rulebook can be found here.
Figma Mockups
All mockups can be found here.
