Snake Oil is a judging game designed by Jeff Ochs in which the players try to sell fun crazy products to a customer. The game is available as both a physical card game and online. The target audience is listed as 10+ and the game seems to be straightforward enough that the players do not require a lot of experience with board/card games.
Snake Oil teaches us what makes players immersed in a role when they are given a lot of creative freedom. It also let us examine what boundaries and rules need to be in place for players to be incentivized to act as their assigned character. Our team’s game is based on a similar round robin structure, with the central idea of players acting and improvising as specific characters. In Snake Oil, the player whose turn it is picks a role to portray, while all other players pitch their products. What does this player vs player and judge mechanic incentivize, and will this work for the game we want to make?
I played Snake Oil online, with a group of 4 friends, which included 2 people who have taken one improv class, and 2 people who have played Dungeons and Dragons before. There are a lot of interesting dynamics that came up during gameplay that I think are relevant to the game we are designing.
There was a consistent blurring of the magic circle. During gameplay, players often included inside jokes, knowledge about each other, even vulnerability (meaning them as people being emotionally vulnerable). An example of this is my friend Victoria trying to sell me a “fur tree” with the line: “think about how cunty it would be” (please let me know if this isn’t appropriate but it is a legit quote). After I chose her as the winner she added: “I only chose to use the word cunty cause I knew it would get to you”. This teaches us that in our game we have to account for the very strong possibility that the improv will be infused with elements of the outside world, that the magic circle will not be airtight.
Additionally, the mechanic of everyone pitching in a random order creates a dynamic where players comment on each other’s submissions or play off of each other’s answers. For example, my friend Cameron went last one round and started his speech with “These other 2 were so basic”. On the other hand, I also observed a different dynamic, where if it just so happens that a very strong submission from a player goes first, the other players might feel discouraged or like it was “a tough act to follow” (also quote from Cameron). These observations exemplify the fact that the order of the players presenting might play a role in the dynamics created. This brings up the question should we continue with our decision of random order, or do we want to enforce a clear order?
Lastly, throughout the game it was clear that the person whose round it was (the judge) did not feel immersed in their role. This is the opposite of what we want for our game. We hope that everyone would be immersed in their role, including the “host” or judge. It seemed that players who were pitching did feel incentivized to really take on the persona of a salesman, while the judge rarely, if ever, took on the persona of the customer type they were assigned. From my perspective as a player, I felt like I was only acting as the customer type when one of the players was directly addressing me as that customer. One lesson from this is that the customer giving an intro would have been helpful, as it would help the players know which direction to go in. This is of great help to our game design, and we did make this change after my critical play. It seems that a short introduction, and most importantly one including a name for the character, is usually enough for players to embody a whole different persona.
Snake Oil was an incredibly helpful game in our study of what makes players immersed in characters they are assigned to portray. It shows us dynamics that we need to consider and either accept or design away from. It also exemplifies a structure that doesn’t work at incentivizing players to act or improvise and moves us towards mechanics that do.
