Our team was split between two ideas coming in to this class. We all liked two ideas: modeling the evolution of a social media app in its journey from a high value, user centered experience to an ad infested wasteland, and modeling the tumultuous, fraught discussions and negotiations between different stakeholders that goes in to admitting a class of students to a prestigious college.
We opted for the “bake off” strategy where we created and tested two prototypes.
College Admissions
- Players engaged with the material and had spirited discussions about which students to admit
- The procedure for discussing and admitting students was largely ignored–instead of discussing one at a time they discussed all of their students at once
- While they were interested in completing their goal, they were also all working to get all goals completed, meaning that ultimately there wasn’t too much asymmetry between the players.
- There seemed to be an optimal solution where, given all of the information about what candidates they had, there would be a set of people that would always best meet their goals.
Enshitification
- We unfortunately had a little bit less time to prototype enshitification, but we were still able to gain some valuable insights
- It wasn’t always obvious what the best move was regarding adding more monetization
- The exponential scaling of money earned was exciting and satisfying
- The negative feedback loops were clear to see and understand.
The Decision
After conducting both prototypes, there was still no clear “winner” in our minds. However, our prototype for college admissions reminded us of a previous P1 project–Inspector Inspector–and we were fortunate enough to be sitting next to Jose, one of the team members on that project. We had a short discussion with him about cooperative argumentative games, and he cautioned that they are extremely hard to get right. The biggest warning he had was that there can’t be one optimal solution. He also emphasized that players choices have to feel meaningful throughout the game, and when a game comes down to a decision at the end of play, that is a lot trickier to make work.
We also struggled with the question of whether this could be a systems game. While we think it could work, we ultimately decided that Enshitification lends itself to being modeled by a system much more clearly and easily than college admissions.
With all of these considerations, we eventually decided to pursue enshitifcation for our P3 project.
Looking forward, we’re very aware that we have a lot to do in terms of building a game that can satisfyingly map this system. We’ve also been wanting to create a board game given our smaller team and collective lack of experience creating games, but we worry the system may better lend itself to a digital game. We also recognize that, if we make this a multiplayer board game, we need to figure out how we are going to make sure the players actually interact with each other rather than just playing in parallel.
