Two years ago, when I was a sophomore, I shopped CS 247G. I made it through the Mafia class before a scheduling conflict forced me to drop—but before I did so, I remember sitting in the sun on the patio behind Sapp, lifting my head as one of two mafias, and experiencing the pure glee that comes with conspiring with a teammate to win over players who outnumbered us greatly. I was just starting out on my journey as a Design student at Stanford then, but I knew that this kind of social connection was what I wanted to keep pursuing throughout my time at Stanford.
Two years on, I’ve continued to chase after that spark—in my design projects, in my writing as an English major. I came into this class for the second time thinking about how to best make that happen with the strengthened relationships I had in the class—I knew no one the first time I shopped CS 247G, and yet this time I walked into a room of familiar faces—and the skills I had spent my time at Stanford sharpening—PRL experience, worldbuilding and storytelling techniques, etc. For me, games—even solitary ones—have always been about feeling less alone, and I wanted to make a project that honored that.
So it made sense that the idea for my P2 project emerged out of a Mafia mod we did at the start of the quarter, and that it ended up being a sardonic, grimly hilarious, feminist game that not only functioned to bring players together in solidarity but also brought my teammates and I closer. It was so rewarding to let ourselves run creatively wild, and then fit our ideas into the productive constraints of game design. Our world was replete with two types of currency, six characters corresponding to six players and six different locations on our board, and mini-narratives—embedded, frame plots—that strung locations together into cohesive stories about each character. We leaned into the fellowship aesthetic by creating mechanisms for affairs and lesbian love alliances all while asking players to compete to win against each other; we treated the board as a staging ground for enacting story by asking players to traverse it in order to complete different missions to kill their husbands (e.g. go to the Docks to complete kill condition 1, collect more fish and reputation before going to the Church to complete kill condition 2, perhaps form an alliance or have an affair along the way); we considered the architecture of the board before designing it in a spiral that functioned similarly to a Monopoly loop but fell more in line with our ethereal, nautical themes. As we put together our rule deck, I thought about what I’d learned in the Plants vs Zombies onboarding lecture, and found myself splitting instructions up into smaller bits (“sophisticated caveman” style), establishing a logical visual hierarchy (fish for wealth, stars for reputation, octopus for sapphic alliances, shrimp for affairs with someone else’s husband).
We were challenged in so many ways—playtesting over and over again so we would know how to eliminate unwanted loops and behavior patterns, workshopping our rules endlessly to make them as seamless and and clear as possible, dealing with all the difficulties that come with working with wood (making multiple CAD files, planning to ShopBot, pivoting to laser cutting instead, trying to turn pieces on the lathe before resorting to the fordham, carving linocut stamps, sanding, staining, and the list goes on…). But the process of this endless iterating was so rewarding—each step helped me grow as a designer and a team member, and the more we worked out the kinks in our project, the more it felt like this little seaside town with the smell of fish, the lively tavern, the slippery cobblestone streets of the fish market, and Klaus and Mikkel and Soren and all the other husbands, was coming alive. And knowing that we had made this world an imaginary reality—from nothing into something—was so rewarding. I’ve learned that next time I embark on a project, I should aim to be as boundlessly creative as I felt in this one, that I should surround myself with teammates I feel deeply connected to, steeped in the belief that any idea is possible.
I love this!