Print n’ Play
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16ul1p-VZwDYMAvfZhWYFrUPtvw6srb6o/view?usp=sharing
Overview
breaking my silence is a satirical role-playing game modeled after Youtube drama. It aims to give players a “behind-the-scenes” glimpse at what really motivates the content creation industry: the fight for followers.
At its core, players choose which character they want to roleplay as from a cast of six fictional Youtubers, each with a whacky brand and personality. Then, they go toe-to-toe as they debate “controversial” video topics (such as “pineapple on pizza,” “socks and sandals,” and “is water wet?”). At the end of each round, players bet on their favorite Youtuber, staking their own followers and reputation in the process. Ultimately, the weighted spin of the Youtube algorithm decides who feels the sting of a DMCA strike and who profits off the platform’s drama.
Our goal with breaking my silence was ultimately to simulate Youtube controversy and cancel culture. The real workflow of Youtubers is often shrouded by the apparent “glamor” of the career, but in an increasingly online world, it is important to remember that even your favorite creator is motivated by profit. Youtube is a platform on which you must fight for the adoration of the masses whilst dodging scandals and cancellation, and we hope that putting players into the mindset of content creators drives home that point. However, to keep the game fun, we give them silly, non-controversial topics to argue over. This way, players can experience the process without starting legitimate fights.
Final Concept Map
History of Versions/Playtesting
Playtest 1 (12/4/2023)
Demographics: 23M, 24F | 377G Students
Notes taken during play:
- 1 free cancellation escape via an apology video
- Each youtuber has certain conditions they need to meet in their apology video
- Voting identifies the player up for cancellation
- 50/50 chance of cancellation
- Lose wagered followers
- Win 4x the wager
- Gain 1 follower token per round
- Using a coin to determine who gets canceled
- Maybe have player tokens to reveal who gets voted for
- 1-2-1-2 45 seconds each for the debate round
- Coin flip for ties in voting round
- 1 free response at the end of debate power card
- After 3 cancellations, your account is deleted and you restart your channel with only 1 follower token (your mom and extended family, at her behest)
- Find more “vs” video topics
- Well-done vs rare steaks
- Player mat
- Apology video slot
- Cancellation slots
- Followers bag
- Spot for the character card
- Game mat?
- Keep only round robin list sheet
- Distinct versions for 4, 5, 6 players
Hilariously, neither of us had ever played our own game before. For this playtest, we each took at 3 character cards and played through a round, experimenting with the rules and follower counts. Above are the notes we took and modifications we made. As far as Playtest 2 goes, our priority changes are:
- 1 Free Cancellation per Game
- Voting Identifies the Player up for Cancellation
- Cancellation is determined by a coin flip
- Lose wagered followers
- Win 4x the wager
- 1-2-1-2 45 seconds each for the debate round
- Gain 1 follower token per round
- Keep only round robin list sheet
- Distinct versions for 4, 5, 6 players
- After 3 cancellations, your account is deleted and you restart your channel with only 1 follower token
- Ties in Voting broken by betting power
- “Point at the player who you support”
Playtest 2 (12/5/2023)
Demographics: 4 CS 377G Students in their early 20s
Notes for playtest:
- It took a second but people loosened up
- Arbitrary choosing of who goes first.
- Caused confusion at certain points
- This group kinda knew what they were doing, which helped people loosen up
- Feedback
- Game is just as fun
- Can’t have same player over and over again
- If you don’t like your hand, change it out
- Give a little bit of time to think before you respond
- The tray isn’t amazingly effective, maybe change the configuration, since they can’t look at everyones cards and see their backgrounds.
- Needs to be easy to reference, stand up in the middle?
- Big text, name tag esque?
- Most of the fun comes from the characters, add more characters so it doesn’t get stale
- The intense point system contradicts the party game vibe
Playtest 3 (12/7/2023)
Demographics: 3 377G Students + 1 Guest
Notes taken during play:
- They want to add people to ongoing drama and call other players out
- We modded during play to allow players to rope each other into drama
- Order of debate rounds is confusing
- Cap betting value at 5
- Everyone is betting the max every time
- Should players be allowed to Attack each other in an apology video?
- By having the vote be a coin flip after voting, losing the popular vote feels less impactful
- Player who made the video who wins the vote gets extra followers?
- Apology video to earn the tripled bet reward?
- Or does it skew the odds of cancellation?
- One player suggested that it would be cool to collaborate with their competitors
- Tokens should be valued above 1
- Events or other crises to motivate changes in opinions on topics
- Change label on current vote/wager on player mat
- One player suggested adding a method of “spending followers” to get special powers
- “I have to calm down after!”
One major change we made for this playtest was that players had to leave the attack cards played against them in front of themselves for the rest of the game (as a sort of in-game memory of events). This prompted two notable changes:
- Players really wanted to rope other Youtubers into the game, even ignoring the topic of debate to instead re-visit past drama from another youtuber.
- An in-game lore emerged as players made up rumors and committed to their personalities. Players kept referring to past attack cards played against earlier in the game.
While there are a great number of changes we could make based on this playtest, we only have time for one. In our opinion, the most important mechanic to solidify is that of cancellation. Going forward, we will test changes to the odds of cancellation:
- Two coins will be flipped and both must be won to survive cancellation. However, an apology video makes it so only one coin must be flipped.
Playtest 4 (12/12/2023)
Demographics: 24M Stanford Alumnus, 23M Serious Gamer, 24F 377G student, 23F Stanford Student
Notes taken during play:
- The personas got laughs, helped people get into it
- Introductions helped get people into it
- Did not initially deal out attack cards (didn’t finish setup)
- Clarify in rules?
- Interesting if you could write your own attack cards
- First round didn’t use a ton of attack cards
- Need to add Apology video to rule set
- Clarify that attack cards are attached to the character for the rest of the game
- Clarify that attack cards can be played on any video not just the last 2
- Have the character cards facing out so other people can see them
- maybe make stands for the character cards?
- People who made the videos often forgot to bid
- Apology video was genius
- Feedback
- Fun, good roleplay
- Really liking the roleplay, realize late they had to convince other people
- Really bought into it
- Some roles (conspirislime) felt inherently more cancellable than others
- Choosing a specific streamer where you’re building your reputation was cool
- One thing hard: Hard to find reasons why you would care about certain topics
- Ex: why would choco vicky be into NFT streams
- Moderator thought: It forces them to act imo. No one has strong opinions on sandwich cutting, yet it went really well.
- Topic cards: initially kinda confusing, but it gives an interesting advantage to the person who draws them
- Each person starts with an attack card/rumor or two
- Help people who struggle at start or aren’t great with roleplay
- Apology video
- Majority votes?
- Maybe only have as the last ditch effort to avoid strike 3
- Dice roll for cancellation
- Have a range of impacts
- One idea: remove a talking point permanently (ex: choco vicky can’t talk about cats)
- Tracker for what phase of the game we’re in (video, voting, canceling)
- Fun, good roleplay
This playtest ran fairly smoothly! Changing the odds of cancellation seemed to work well and we got a great deal of useful feedback from our players. The biggest point of tension was the order of actions. For example, players would forget to wager on their own videos. Going forward, this is something we need to resolve with either clearer rules or a digital component. However, players still had fun and the basic mechanics of the debate worked well for engagement.
Conclusion/Future Work
Over the course of this project, we’ve learned a lot about balance, both in terms of probability and game dynamics. It is tricky to model a system like Youtube because there are many, many moving parts and most of them behave unpredictably. Social cancellation is also just a hard phenomenon to guide players through because it rarely feels entirely fair. That being said, we’ve both really enjoyed working on this game, and might continue developing it after CS 377G is over. We find it legitimately fun and think that it could be an awesome party game with just a little bit more refinement. Some ideas we’ll explore if we continue include receiving perks based on the number of followers a player has, modeling the comment section, and creating a pile-on dynamic that allows players to rope uninvolved players into controversy.
