A direction that a lot of us in our team find appealing is judging games that require a substantial amount of creativity and idea generation.
We all find games like Cards Against Humanity uninteresting after many plays since the game loses a lot of its humor once you know all the cards and the shock value is gone. Some ideas we are considering include drawing games or an evil startup pitch game.
Some questions we may want to answer using prototypes:
- What mediums of creativity are the most accessible and inclusive to beginners?
A big problem with drawing games for example is that it favors those with drawing experience and excludes those without it, which can feel unfair. In our game, we want the wildness and intrigue of a player’s ideas to determine the outcome of a game, not their pre-existing skills.
We could explore this question with an experiential prototype that has players respond to the same prompt with different mediums (i.e. draw / write about / speak about your evil startup), and then observe player behaviors to see which facilitates inclusion most effectively.
I predict that the spoken medium will be most inclusive. Under the assumption that these games would typically be played in a friend group where socialization is already happening, speaking likely has the lowest barrier to entry.
2. What kind of topics generate the most humor?
Some of our ideas, like evil startup pitching, may only be humorous in a context like Stanford and fall flat everywhere else. Many creative judging games exist already, so the key differentiating factor for our game is the context.
For a prototype, I can imagine coming up with a small handful of varied topics that we hypothesize will be successful, and then have players (from diverse backgrounds/locations) generate on them, seeing which ideas allow for the most creativity and humor.
I hypothesize that the more specific the topic, the more enjoyable it will be, and a lot of the enjoyment will depend on the absurdity of the topic. I predict players will enjoy being put into a role, but a role that they have some existing understanding of that provides a basis for their ideation.
3. What’s the ideal number of players?
One of the biggest issues I have had playing judging games is having too many players. Particularly, I find it is very difficult for the judge of the game to make a decision when presented with too many options, which can slow down the pace of the game substantially.
We can prototype this by presenting a player with a set number of things to judge (can be anything depending on what medium we choose). We continuously give an increasing number of items to judge and observe how long it takes the player to make a decision for each round, as well as any signs of frustration.
Since humans can hold around 3-5 items in their working memory at a time, I predict the player sweet spot will also lie in this range.
