Short Exercise: What do Prototypes Prototype? – Niam

Come up with 3-5 questions your various game prototypes might answer for P1. 

For each question, include a sentence or two about:

• Why is this an important question to answer
• What type of prototype will you make to answer this question?
• What is your guess about how it will turn out? (the practice of prediction grows your intuition)

1. Is it easy and fun for players to come up with conspiracy scenarios?
   1. This is what the basis of the game is based on, so really important to answer. If it is stressful rather than easy to come up with conspiracy theories, or if it becomes repetitive, then the game is not fun to play. We need to strike the balance between interesting or unique and difficult to improvise. We also need to figure out how much time people need to comfortably come up with things without boring everyone with how long it takes. And if it should be done in teams or individually.
   2. We’ll have to make some different types of conspiracy cards and try them out ourselves and with friends to see how people find it and ask for feedback after
   3. I think there is absolutely is a form of this that will the fun and strike that balance. However, we may need to iterate the complexity of the cards, the number of cards picked, convert it to teams, or make other changes in order to find that balance. I think we’ll be off initially.
2. Does the judging mechanism make the game more fun?
   1. We could have a simple game where an individual just comes up with something, or could make the game more interesting with teams coming up with different ideas and a central judge ruling at the end of a round. This would significantly affect the construction of the game mechanics and dynamics, and is very important to answer. Also, we need to know if it is really hard for one side of the players to win (either the conspirators or the evidence people), which would ruin some of the joy of judging.
   2. We’ll have to come up with two versions of the rules, one with this and one without. Play both with some different sets and people, and see how people like it and how they respond.
   3. I think judging will turn out well overall, and I think more people will be able to be involved each round because of this.
3. Should we include evidence cards that ‘disprove’ the theories?
   1. This would add a new dynamic to the game and also take quite a bit of time to come up with, so would be a good thing to see if it is fun early. Can also be incorporated in a couple different ways – by the players coming up with the conspiracy? By another set of players that are the ‘realists’?
   2. We can first just give someone an evidence point out loud, and see how it changes the story or makes the game fun. We can try this with both versions – giving it to the conspiracy team and giving it to another team. And if this works well, we can try to figure out how to translate that physically to cards.
   3. I think this will be fun, but coming up with how to translate evidence into cards that can apply to any conspiracy pair will be much more difficult, and we’ll have to figure out how to adapt for that. We can also make a couple categories of evidence cards and see if that helps. Overall, I think the concept is good and execution will be hard.