Jackbox Talking Points is a game that is available on STEAM designed for 3-8 Players. The game includes a simple mechanic of players improvising a speech based on radomised filled-in prompts by other players and the slidedeck selected by an assistant. The amount of “upvotes” during the talk by other viewers is tracked by a program and ultimately calculated into the total points earned. This determines the winning conditions of players. This game was played during a game night by playing online in a web browser within a steam room hosted by a player’s steam account.
While Jackbox is similar with our P1 game in terms of fundamental gaming mechanics and there are many mods and mechanics our game can learn from Jackbox, some fundamental differences in the usage of autonomy in the mechanics set apart the two games and create an entirely different atmosphere.
Our P1 game is a game where players each draw an image in the response to a ramdomised and unique prompt, only visible to each player. Once players completed their drawings, the illustration is then passed to the left. This new drawing is the slidedeck for the player’s pitch of their startup idea to potential investors.
Both games have a presentation aspect to the mechanics of the game play, and the fun is greatly correlated to the player’s enjoyment when they enter this magic circle and embody the role of someone else to give a compelling speech. For both games, they are fundamentally a game driven by Expression. Players tend to do better and also perform better when they were able to fully communicate the far and surreal reaches of their imagination, I as a listener found myself responding better towards speeches that pleasantly surprised me in a funny way. Similarly our P1 game the most laughter can be heard by players when someone’s pitch focuses on an unexpected interpretation of the illustration.
Figure: The presentation interface of Jackbox Talking Points tracking the upvotes of a speaker
The surface level objective for jackbox is for the players to be funny and entertain their audience members as that is the way to earn the most points by getting a lot of upvotes, however, in my opinion there is also another layer of objective that makes this game so attractive for players, which is the fact that when you enter the magic circle, the concept of embarrassment is alleviated by role-playing this speaker narrative. Even though I hate public speaking and half the time things I said were basically not logical at all, we all still had a fun time because the player contract agreed to lean into the absurdity and embrace the inconsistency of the player speech as an element of entertainment of the game.
Figure: Image of myself giving a speech on “nina the dog” who happens to be a gorilla as well
At the same time, there is a feeling of fellowship with the “assistant” role since your success is highly dependent on the choices of the “assistant” and at the same time, the scores they earn in this round is directly scalable to your performance so there exists a positive incentive for the “assistant” to keep the speaker in their best interest. Since there is a pleasant incentive, this mechanic dissuades possibilities of sabotaging the gameplay of the speaker in any time. Playing this game made me realise that our P1 game also had a hidden “assistant” role, which is the player on the right hand side of the pitcher. Since the rules dictate that you always pass it to the left, this person accidentally is the “assistant” so I think I will suggest that we add a mechanic that encourage positive rewards for positive gameplay of the assistants in order to encourage more fellowship in our P1 game.
Figure: Image depicting the assistant’s screen
While the mechanics of speaking about something that is entirely not generated by the player themselves, there are subtle differences in the execution that creates a completely different sense of fellowship. The player generated prompts from jackbox were heavily guided by a prompt of fill in the remaining of the sentence type prompts. This was helpful for the players to complete the generation of these prompts within a short time span, in order to minimise playtime, however, this comes at the cost of autonomy as it is impossible to come up with genuinely creative prompts when only given a few words to work with, additionally, the design of the presentation also included photos as part of the slidedeck. The creative interpretation is limited due to the high detail and high specificity of these slides, in contrast because players are only given 1 minute to draw a doodle in response to their prompt, it often results in illustrations of very abstract quality. This allows the pitcher to have more autonomy on the narrative they choose to share about this imaginary startup and as a result, the level of surprise for the listener is higher, which will cause a more lighthearted environment as unexpectedness conjures laughter.
