I have two cats. They suck at playing games with each other. It goes like this:
Tuxy, the seven-pound, aptly named tuxedo cat who spent most of his life in a colony of ferals and survived a literal gunshot, brings a certain rabid, yowling intensity. Ascot, a sleek black nine-pounder with a white tuft on his chest, almost seems bored when they tussle.
The real problem, however, isn’t that Tuxy has to jump a weight class and gives up a significant reach advantage. The problem is they have different win conditions, and Ascot ignores Tuxy’s wins.
Tuxy thinks that touching Ascot on the head with a paw scores him a point. Ascot disagrees. Ascot thinks he scores when he touches his teeth to the back of Tuxy’s neck. There’s a lot of daylight between these two rulesets. Tuxy believes there should be a break in the action and a reset for a new round when he scores a point by touching the top of Ascot’s head. Ascot disagrees, ignores Tuxy’s riotous meows of frustration, and shoves his face and chest past Tuxy’s flailing guard so he can touch the back of Tuxy’s neck. By this point, Tuxy is all caps FURIOUS that Ascot doesn’t recognize his brilliant face-touch attack and flips the proverbial table and pounces, which Ascot can easily avoid because he’s larger and generally more athletic. Tuxy falls to the ground and is both embarrassed and even angrier, and then indignant when I step in between them and walk them to different corners so Tuxy can chill.
What’s really going on here? Like I mentioned, they have different rulesets. But a bigger issue is that Ascot doesn’t acknowledge Tuxy’s efforts. Tuxy did something he felt was either clever, or athletic, or bold, and Ascot didn’t even notice. Then Tuxy flips the table.
I think about Tuxy and Ascot a lot when I play games and work on designs. I want to make sure players have a chance to feel clever and have their cleverness seen and acknowledged by the other people at the table. When we’re sorting out the bills, putting the pieces in their holders, and folding the board, we want moments in the game we can look back on and smile about when we remember them. This, I believe, gets to the core of what we want from a game experience. Part of the contract that we make when we sit around a table is that I’m going to give space for your moments and you’re going to give space for mine.
For me, as I’m working on Star Crossed Realms (It’s A Date?) with Mark and Jason, one of the comments we keep going back to is Jason saying, “I want to make decisions that matter.” He wants those Victory Moments where an action he took had a material impact on the direction of the game. For a deckbuilder, that usually means a variety of synergy strategies to choose from as we build our decks. This gets into one of the big challenges of this particular game that Mark, Jason, and I are building. A cooperative deckbuilder is a weird concept. It’s easy to imagine synergy strategies for traditional competitive deckbuilders, i.e., focusing on damage, accruing victory points, pruning out unwanted cards, drawing more cards, etc., but this is more complicated when I’m nominally working with the other person at the table. We want a game flow to make space for each player to have their individual Victory Moments where they feel clever and changed the game in a meaningful way, as well as for the players together to have Victory Moments where they progress towards the end state.
Regardless of what we decide, I think in the end we will have succeeded if players can answer the question, “What moments made you feel like you won, even in a small way?” If they can’t answer, or they can only answer with “When we won the game,” then I’ll know we made a game where Tuxy’s head touches don’t matter. If we can find a way to create multiple, distinctive Victory Moments for both players, then we’ll have created a cooperative game where players had a chance to make choices that matter, both as individuals and as a pair. And that, I think, will be a game worth playing.
— Peter
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