For P1, our team got a direction to head in, but as we spoke about our ideas, we noticed several tensions where we would have to decide for one route or another. Naturally, these present themselves as opportunities or assumptions to be playtested through a prototype. Below I section out and frame some of these tensions as questions.
“Should prompts be left up to the players to create?”
This was more of a practical concern, but prompts created by players allow for much more freedom – for example, games like Apples to Apples and Uno have blank, write-in cards that allow this – just as game-limited prompts can set boundaries on the scope of the game, and would also require us to come up with sufficient paired ambiguous prompts. I think testing this could be done within one game, where one round is governed by given prompts, and the other would rely entirely on the players (or a moderator) creating their own. I find that the outcome will have to rely on finding a way to maintain enough ambiguity in our prompts that can still be reused without boredom; lowkey, I think this might relate to modifying the themes around the two themes, which are currently just labeled as red and black, but I can see these also becoming variables that change per round or per game.
“Given that we established two teams, what relevance should the team name or topic have with the in-game prompts? In other words, what direction should these prompts take?”
This one is a little connected to the previous question, though this one focuses on the depth of the prompts. This may a little too ahead, but we were wondering whether the genre should lean into get-to-know-you types of prompts, or prompts that play into a deception-type of game like Mafia. I think this could be decided by reasoning within our own team, but a prototype can also explore whether completely putting the game behind a fictional realm (or at least, team assignments and prompt responses that don’t actually represent the player), or relying deception, or maybe having players being completely true to themselves, is more fun. There could also be arrangements where prompts require real responses (e.g., favorite dessert) but aren’t tied to the team names (red or black), but I feel like that could be confusing or indicate that one of these mechanics is unnecessary or serves no explicit purpose.
“How can a moderator, if included, still be involved in the game?”
The existence of in-game moderators usually serve a narrator role, like in Mafia, or as a scorekeeper (like referees in sports). In other games this player is also part of the game, such as the banker in Monopoly; this requires us to solidify whether the goal of moderation can go unaffected while remaining a player in-game, or if it’s in fact needed to have them as a non-player. I’m thinking of running two games, where tasks usually handled by the moderator are delegated to one player; a feedback question I was considering was asking for thoughts on approaching moderation through a middle ground (moderator tasks delegated amongst all players). I find that most moderation can be carried out by a manual (e.g., setting a procedure on completing a round), so I have a hunch our feedback will lean towards not needing a non-playing moderator.
“How can the ratio of team sizes contribute to chaos in-game?”
One idea that came up in conversation was to consider an arbitrary ratio for the sizes of the two teams at play. This could create edge cases where every player is on the same team, and none on the opposing side; however, it could also make the pace of the game faster or more confusing, since members won’t have much but speculations as to now not who, but how many people, are in their team. Testing this could involve two runs of the same controlled game, with two decks of cards. One deck is red, and the other black. For one trial, players are arbitrarily given one where there is an even number of members per team (or off-by-one); the other trial would feature shuffling these two card piles into one, and having each player draw from it, face-down. I’m personally leaning towards the latter, because I think in the edge cases, players would still have fun eliminating a suspect when there isn’t one at all (haha situational irony haha).
