For this week’s Critical Play, I played Jackbox.tv’s Poll Mine at the CS247G game night. Poll Mine was created by Jackbox Games, a Chicago-based studio founded in 1989. The platform prioritizes smartphone use to facilitate party-style games that has people connect and play together. The connection to my group’s P1 project, Dealbreakers, is primarily through the ranking system. In Dealbreakers, a key mechanic is the ability to rank different traits and have others guess how the ranker might have laid out their choices. Poll Mine uses a similar ranking system, as each player individually ranks preferences, then tries to guess in teams how the overall party ranked the choices. Players are awarded points for accurate guesses. I was mindful of trying to “play like a designer” in the Jackbox session, and a key question that framed my experience was: “what needs does this ranking/guessing game mechanic satisfy?”. For both the Poll Mine and Dealbreakers, affiliation and information are the key needs being met. I would argue that with affiliation and information as key needs, over indexing on challenge detracts from the fun that the experience is meant to create.
On affiliation, both lean more heavily into succorance or seeking help, as players need to consult with one another to agree on a shared ranking. Dealbreaker’s mechanism to force this collaboration comes from the fact that guessers need to agree on a shared guess of how the ranker laid out their choices. Poll Mine does this by having players discuss in teams to figure out overall rankings for choices. In both cases, affiliation serves to better support information exchange. The collaborative guessing creates a need for players to consider what they know about each other and identifies gaps in that knowledge which is filled through discussion. For both games, I did note that gameplay was actively supported by players knowing each other better before playing. In Poll Mine for example, I played with three of the class TA’s and they used their knowledge of each other’s preferences as tools in the guessing phase, where I was going more off blind guesses. We saw this in Dealbreakers’ playtesting as well, where groups of friends who knew each other beforehand tended to be more engaged and have more strategic guesses than complete strangers. Despite this difference in familiarity, the games aren’t particularly challenging, with points almost secondary to the joy of feeling connection with other players.
Mechanically, the key difference between Poll Mine and Dealbreakers is that Poll Mine is hosted online in a distributed Magic Circle, whereas Dealbreakers is in an analog experience in a shared Magic Circle. When I say distributed Magic Circle, I mean that each person is using their phone as a controller and secondary visual tool, while the laptop (or in our case, projector screen) is the primary hosting space. This creates a balance of intimacy and distance via simultaneous online play. There is also timed decision making in Poll Mine that creates a sense of urgency.
The two games differ most distinctly in terms of aesthetics. Poll Mine employed a cartoonish dark fantasy theme that helped add a mystique to the game play, supported by high fidelity voice acting by the narrator. My bias of familiarity with story-driven RPG’s made these aesthetics very appealing to me, and definitely contributed to my sense-pleasure during the session. Dealbreakers, on the other hand, leans more heavily into fellowship for aesthetics as players try to peer into each other’s minds. Dealbreaker could potentially borrow the idea of having a stronger thematic underpinning for increased immersion, and this can be part of future playtests. Though Poll Mine’s aesthetics appear punishing (dungeons and monsters), the first two rounds of play actually felt quite light and fun. The challenge level supported the experience of fellowship.
This changed in the Poll Mine’s third round, where the activity changed from guessing what the group may have ranked as their top options, to trying to guess the exact complete rankings from bottom to top. This was a huge jump in difficulty, with both teams losing all their lives on incorrect guesses, and the game ending on a bit on an anticlimax. This was a peculiar design choice, as the difficulty spike in activities broke immersion, and hampered strategic play. The game tries to mitigate this by revealing some rankings after a few wrong guesses, but by this point everyone had lost all their lives already and we were in sudden death. Poll Mine would benefit from rebalancing that third round, as I ended the game with the sense that it was always designed for me to lose all the lives I worked hard to accumulate in the first two rounds. This is a key lesson for Dealbreakers, as we considered a deeper and more complex points system, but through playtesting decided to keep the game simple to facilitate fun. Points help create a sense of competition, but the point is not the points (pun intended), the point is the sense of camaraderie that is only damaged by an over-emphasis on points and challenge oriented play.
