Team 2’s game is Yap Battle. Two players at a time are assigned a lighthearted topic to debate and the rest of the players vote on the winner. The catch is that they each have words and actions that they have to sneak into their debate to earn points. If they get caught, they don’t get those points.
Is it fun to sneak words into debates?
Since this is really the core mechanic of the game, it’s absolutely crucial that we figure out whether this mechanic is actually fun. A look and feel prototype for this can be extremely simple–we could have one person give two others a debate topic and give each of them secret words/actions to slip in to their debate. Then the players can try to sus out what the other person is doing while they have the debate. This wouldn’t require any materials–just three people. I think that it will be fun contingent on how seriously people take the debate.
Will points and winners/losers skew the voting?
Since we want the winner of the debate to be determined by a group vote, we have to figure out whether that can be somewhat impartial or if people will just vote for the person with fewer points so they have a better chance of winning the game. If that’s the case, then the actual debate won’t matter and the game will be a lot less interesting. To determine this, we could conduct a version of the game without sneaking in words at all, where the first person to win three debates wins the game. We could set it up so a player with 1 or 0 points intentionally does poorly in a debate against a player with 2 points and see how other players in the game vote. I think that if the debate is anywhere close, the others will vote for the person with fewer points. However, a lot of this is contingent on how competitive the players are.
What types of things should people have to sneak into debates?
Our original premise is that people should have to sneak in words to the debates, but it’s possible this could end up feeling repetitive or stale. We want to experiment with other things, such as actions that a player has to do or rhetorical mechanisms they’re forced to use. This is another look and feel prototype that could look very similar to the first prototype I outlined, replacing the secret words with actions or other things that we can think up. My feeling is that actions will be a fun way to spice it up and give the players more dynamic challenges and that rhetorical mechanisms could end up feeling too academic in a playful game, but I could totally be wrong–it might be a ball and a teaching/practice mechanism.
