- Identify the basic elements in a game of your choice (actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, players).
- Game: Connect four
- Actions: Placing a puck
- Goals: Get four pucks of your color in adjacent spaces forming a line
- Rules: place one puck of you color per turn
- Objects: The board, the pucks (your color, opponent’s color)
- Playspace: Anywhere with a grid and objects that can function as pucks for both players. Traditionally, a plastic 7×6 grid that allows you to drop pieces in from the top.
- Players: Any two people
- As a thought experiment, swap one element between two games: a single rule, one action, the goal, or the playspace. For example, what if you applied the playspace of chess to basketball? Imagine how the play experience would change based on this swap.
I chose to swap the goal of tag into the game of Snakes and Ladders. This changes the game by adding much more player interaction between opponents. Now, instead of just trying to progress up the board through luck, players are trying to chase or evade one another. Now, the chutes can be advantageous rather than just moving players away from the end space.
- Pick a simple game you played as a child. Try to map out its space of possibility, taking into account the goals, actions, objects, rules, and playspace as the parameters inside of which you played the game. The map might be a visual flowchart or a drawing trying to show the space of possibility on a single screen or a moment in the game.
Shell Game Playspace (image wouldn’t upload clearly so linked to a pdf!)
- Pick a real-time game and a turn-based game. Observe people playing each. Make a log of all the game states for each game. After you have created the game state logs, review them to see how they show the game’s space of possibility and how the basic elements interact.
Gameplay logs (same issue with image quality)
Tic-tac-toe: Here, the playspace is very restrictive. There are only three “big” experiences for each player: winning, losing, and drawing. Since there are only nine possible spaces, players have very few choices each round, and their choices are restricted even further by this opponent’s moves. In the game played out here, I don’t think there was a way for the person playing O’s to win over the other player’s strategy.
Tag: We played in a restricted area (designated small plot of grass) which made it more difficult for people to evade the person that was ‘it’. At any given moment, a person could be it, be chased, or be ignored. Different people chose different strategies when they were it, allowing for different experiences by the other players with each new iteration of roles.
