broken games - nicolò tedeschi - santa ragione: ngdc 2012

Nicolò Tedeschi - Santa Ragione

About Broken GamesOr how I stopped worrying and learned to let games happen.

sabato 3 novembre 2012

Nicolò Tedeschi - Santa Ragione

Santa RagioneA micro interaction design studio, founded in 2010 in Milano, now based nowhere.


BROKEN GAMES ?

Games that due to a breach in the rules,

to unclear victory conditions or abiguos

components let interact players with

some parts of the very game sturcture.


isn’t it just bad design?• Odd unanticipated loose ends

• Ambiguous rules

• Ambiguous game components

• Unclear victory conditions


Doug Wilson’s B.U.T.T.O.N.• Digitally mediated party game where 2 to 8

players have to push or defend theyr contoller.

• Absense of total systemization opens up a space for playfull subversiveness.

• Contingent on the particular players and the particular setting.

• Rewarding when the players manage to keep it going “right”.


Henning Eichberg’s Bodily Democracy“The rule is not the game. The flow of the game is

in contraddiction to the achievement. The game is

what starts beyond the rule and beyond the

striving for the result, beyond the ‘it’.”


Bodily Democracy

• Not self-explainatory

• No need to quantify outcomes

• Exsist only when beeing played


Bernie DeKoven’s Well Played GameA game is something that “eather we achieve it

together or we don’t achieve it at all.”


Well Played Game

• Games has no purpose

• Games emerge from the mediation between

players, rules and game components.

• A consistent fiction is more important than

tons of rules

• Everybody WINS!!


to sum up:

• No quantifiable outcomes

• Limited supervision of the computer in enforcing rules.

• Ambiguous rules

• Ambiguous game components

• Unclear or absent victory conditions

• Strong fiction


Creating a consistent game fiction"[...] in this view, the practice of game design

become less about crafting systems, and more

about mood setting and instilling into players the

appropriate 'spirit'."


to manage players expectations.because when a game looks like it’s enabling a

certain kind of play and then it denies it by

limitations it is a horrible experience.


Escape from the Aliens in Outer SpaceA sci-fi horror board game in which positions

and identities are concealed: players can kill

and eliminate teammates, cheat or be

suddenly out of the game.


What seems like a messy and broken game design enables for extremely dynamic play sessions and for exciting and unexpected strategies to arise.

• Unclear victory conditions.

• Easy to cheat

• Enforce betrayal and can quickly become unbalanced

• Severe death mechanic with expulsion from the game


Not strategies directly designed by usBut they emerge from the inherent

complexity and consistency of the game

components


“shut up and sit down” review quotes:

•“Escape from the Aliens’ simple rules act like an onion. Each layer you peel away reveals another layer of tactics.“

•“[...] And then you get into double bluffs, where the humans act like humans, and, and, and all this is before we’ve gotten into the territory of mind games, where you might act scared or fall silent at the table to fool others into thinking that they’re zeroing in on your tender little takeaway of a character.”


Maps and Rules EditorWe knew the game was broken and that its

very brokness was creating an open

playground


A strive for consistency

• a Rule Question - Blabla Blabbla

So we have:

2 humans escaped (winner)

3 aliens dead (loser??)

1 human alive at turn 39 with no pod avalaible for escape... (winner? loser?)

According to rulebook: [...]

What's your position???

• Ove Ahiman :

Thematicly you can interpret it as the aliens having eggs onboard, and the humans have 39 minutes to get out before they hatch and swarm the whole ship.


Winning?Not necessary for a game to take place,

winning conditions become just a way to let

players know that their actions have an effect

on the system, a way of framing inputs and

outputs.


MirrorMoonA first-person puzzle-adventure game set on a

uninhabited planet that is experiencing a full

solar eclipse.


Data


Intentionally designed broken games lead to discover new and unexpected mechanics that can not simply emerge from playtesting or thinkering.

Instead of approaching games as containers to fill with our own content, where the author is the absolute ruler that own the contents and spoon-feeds his users, we can build a coherent environment for play to take place and even if potentially broken, open to interpretation where even outcomes are a result of a mediation process among all game elements.


Marcel Duchamp’s Ready MadeQuestion the world around you, reinterpret and

question the very medium you use and ask player

to do the same.

“I force myself to contradict myself in order to

avoid conforming to my own taste.”


C'est le regardeur qui fait le tableau

“The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the

external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the

creative act. Those who look are as important as those who make.”


More than what you see...

• The artwork ha no retinal value, it’s more

than the sum of its parts.

• All its components act as catalysts of the

narrative fiction.

• Our engagement with art is a form of

movement, of travel, a journey across time and

space towards something we consider the

work of art, although that work only exists in

our working towards it.


RialzoReinterpretation of the physical space. Its up

to the ability of players to see things

differently and to stretch the rules, within the

game fiction, to their advantage.


Stop worrying, let games happen!


Info and contacts:

Nicolò Tedeschi - Santa Ragione:

http://www.santaragione.com

[email protected]

@santaragione






mailto:[email protected]

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broken games - nicolò tedeschi - santa ragione: ngdc 2012

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