W. Eric Martin: Game Expections, Great and Otherwise

Every creative medium has its own quirks, elements unique to the manner in which something is presented to the observer. I was reminded of this while reading T.C. Boyle’s novel Talk Talk over the holidays. While many of Boyle’s books skew towards the literary, Talk Talk is more of a thriller—a literary thriller, mind you, but a thriller just the same.

The main character, a deaf woman who’s the victim of identity theft, spends much of the book chasing after the antagonist, but when the characters nearly crash together in a car chase in the middle of the book, I felt no real thrill, no sense of impending resolution or rise towards a climax. Why? Because the event took place in the middle of the book.

Creating a Structure

One of the defining elements of books, which may or may not be a weakness, is that the reader knows how much material remains to be revealed at every point on the literary journey. As you make your way through page after page, the author’s efforts to build suspense can be undone by your knowledge of where you are in the story. With half the tale remaining in Talk Talk, I knew that the villian would get away somehow, leaving the protagonist to further nurse her wounds and find some new way to track down her tormentor.

Authors can certainly turn this component of a book’s structure to their advantage. My wife recently read Peony in Love by Lisa See, and while the author sets up a will-she-or-won’t-she situation that seems likely to be unresolved until the story’s climax, the story takes a completely unexpected turn about midway through that redefines everything you might have thought to that point. House of Leaves features a huge chunk of unusual text formatting that has you racing through a few hundred pages in minutes, thus thwarting your expectations of pace and resolution.

Television shows work similar to books. At the twenty-minute mark in an hour-long program, for example, you know to expect more twists in the episode’s plot.

On the other hand, unless you look at their packaging ahead of time, movies and music have an open structure that leave you guessing as to where you are in the storytelling. Will the slasher claim another victim, or will the teenage virgin figure out how to stop this monster? Is another verse coming, or will this keyboard solo just keep going until the song ends? (Music and movies on television, however, largely reverse the formula. You know that the eight o’clock movie has to end in time for the news and music videos rarely last more than five minutes, if that.)

Playing Books and Movies

Games can hit both ends of the expectation scale and anywhere in-between. For the open book experience, you can find games with a defined structure: No Thanks! is a single trip through the deck; Amun-Re lasts six rounds; Time Is Money allots only sixty seconds to each player; Qwirkle ends when the tiles run out; Gipsy King ends when all spaces are filled for the second time; Formula Dé ends at the finish line or in a fireball.

For the live-it-and-learn-it analogue to movies, you can go for old-school games like Risk and Monopoly (when money is added through Free Parking, thus eliminating the steady removal of money from the game) or more modern experience games. When I arrived at a game convention in the fall of 2007 at noon, people playing Arkham Horror at a nearby table were bemoaning their fate: “We’re dead, we’re completely hopeless, we’re so close to being wiped out.” They had started at 8am, and after four hours they were sure that the end was near. When I left at 5:30pm, however, they were still playing that same game. “We got lucky with X, Y and Z,” they said, and sanity prevailed. Until you see the credits start to roll, in other words, you don’t really know whether the movie’s over.

Party games also tend to adopt the feel of movies since their playing times vary greatly depending on player performance: Time’s Up, for example, can drag far beyond what’s comfortable due to player inability to give or guess a decent charade. Trivial Pursuit can fill an entire evening as you fail to win the same pie slice over and over again.

A lot of games fall in the middle ground between defined playing limits and open-ended structures, but a clever designer, developer or graphic artist can place clues for what to expect within the game, both in terms of game length and in the playing of the game:

• Scoring tracks: Fifth Avenue can suffer from group think and end abruptly when players race through the supply of businesses—but a winning score in the teens should set off alarms when the scoring chart goes up to 80. Carcassonne includes supplemental scoring tiles worth 50 or 100 points, which hints that the 50 points on the scoring track might suffice in some games but not be enough in others.

• Types of currency: Container from Valley Games includes $1s, $2s, $5s, $10s and $20s—but in two games no player has touched a $20 except to translate the final container scoring into hard currency. The $20s must circulate some of the time in some playings or else they wouldn’t be include. Thus, I’m thinking about how our style of play keeps the bills from entering the game and what I could do differently in the future.

  Viva Pamplona has players run with the bulls in this famed Spanish town, and whenever the bull attacks, players score or lose points depending on the location of their three tokens. When those tokens enter a stadium at the end of the movement track, they score more points when other tokens have already entered. The amount of “money” in the game varies widely, and seeing a huge pile of chips in the box after finishing a tight game hints at other possibilities.

• Limited resources: Tigris and Euphrates ends when one player needs to draw tiles but can’t. Knowing that players can use anywhere from two to twelve tiles per turn gives you a ballpark figure for how many turns you’ll have in the entire game, which gives you a sense of when to attack and when to merely build your resources and position.

• Moving goal line: In TransAmerica, all players but one score penalty points at the end of a round, and the game ends when at least one player breaks through a scoring barrier. After the second round—assuming the game hasn’t already ended—this barrier is reset to two spaces away from the player with the lowest score, thereby adjusting the length of the game to match the circumstances of the participating players.

Design elements like these help transmit the feel and flow of the game to players, both in terms of what to expect and what’s possible

Building the Arc

Jonathan Degann wrote an excellent series of articles for The Games Journal about characteristics of games that make them great, one of which is the Story Arc. Here’s how Degann describes the concept:

What I call Story Arc in a game is the quality of having the situations and decisions metamorphose during the course of a single game so that the player has the experience of participating in a story with a wide sweep. When a game has a beginning, middle and an end, it is more than just a series of decisions. The entire game is an adventure in which the players and the pieces are characters.

For the Story Arc to happen, a player has to know what kind of playing experience to expect from the game. If I’m not sure when a game will end, I can’t be a part of the game’s story; I’m being carried in a vehicle that I can’t control and only in retrospect will I be able to point to the beginning, middle and end of the game’s story. During the game itself, however, I won’t know where I am, which will likely mute my enthusiasm for the game.

If the game design can create player expectations, they’ll be able to follow the Story Arc and participate in the game’s build-up and climax. Think of Ticket to Ride: Players start with 45 trains, and they each know that once any player starts scraping the bottom of the barrel, the game will soon end. They can visually track the train supply of each player and adjust their plans as needed: “Max has six trains left, but he has only one card in hand, so I’ll have at least three turns before he can trigger the final round, which means I might be able to risk drawing tickets....”

The games that Degann uses as good examples of Story Arc—Puerto Rico, Through the Desert, and Acquire—all have design elements that create player expectation: In Puerto Rico, you can see the colonist supply, VP supply, or available building spaces disappearing; in Through the Desert, you can count the camels waiting to be placed and know the minimal number of turns that remain; and in Acquire, you watch the gameboard fill up and the size of the companies grow until one of the two game end conditions is reached. Their transparency in creating expectations is key to a player’s immersion in the Story Arc.

For a counter-example, I’ll point to 10 Days in Asia, which I’ve played a half-dozen times. Players have few expectations of when the game will end beyond their own personal development. You might have two tiles connected in your itinerary, you might have nine—whatever the case, you won’t know whether you have time to reconfigure your route or whether you should just keep searching for that lone country in the middle of nowhere unless the other players give a hint as to how close they are to competing their goal. The winner will have a fully realized Story Arc, while everyone else hops straight from the middle to the closing period.

This lack of clear expectations doesn’t mean that 10 Days in Asia is a failure—but it does mean that players will develop a number of smaller, unintegrated Story Arcs to be compared once the game ends instead of developing a more involved, shared Story Arc. They share the game, but not the same playing experience.

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Most of our games of Container have featured at least one player with personal cash comfortably over $100 by the time the game ended and before containers on the island were scored. Posted by J C Lawrence on Jan 5, 2008 at 05:03 PM | #

Same here:  Usually at least two of our Container players are playing with 20s - a small portion of the provided stock of them, but using them nonetheless. Posted by Nathan Morse on Jan 6, 2008 at 05:35 AM | #

We too, in our games of Container, doe have need for the $20s, with in hand cash of over $100 towards the end of the game for some players. If people start bidding $20 or $25 for a full ship, and that gets doubled by the bank, those $20 cards come in to play. Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Jan 7, 2008 at 05:23 AM | #

I just played Santiago over the weekend. I’m reminded that the game comes with a stack of 50s (Escudos!), while during the game you’re rich if you approach 20. They are (or at least can be) used in the final scoring, but a single scoring is rarely more than 50, so it is likely that the 20s are sufficient. Posted by Chris Comeaux on Jan 7, 2008 at 12:18 PM | #

Transamerica - we never apply the “shortened course” rule. The game is pretty fast anyway. We prefer to let the start-player rotation run round the table at least a couple of times, because it can be advantageous to see where other players are starting before placing your own home station. Shortening the scoring track would reduce the opportunity for all players to get at least a couple of turns going late in the running order. Posted by Tim Synge on Jan 8, 2008 at 06:40 AM | #

Clearly our group has been playing Container differently from the folks who commented here. Group think plays a big role in the game, so perhaps I just need to try it with other people. Tim, we also play TransAmerica without the shortened course, but for those new to the game—or unfamiliar with Eurogames—I think it’s a good suggestion so their first games don’t last too long. Neophyte players sometimes have less patience and shorter attention spans. You have to build up that muscle! Posted by W. Eric Martin on Jan 8, 2008 at 10:23 AM | #

Even though we see scores in the low 100s in Container, the 20s don’t see a lot of use. Cash gets cycled a lot, and a big percentage of final scores may be containers on the island. Sometimes, components are dictated by production considerations, not game-play. The score track may go to 100 because that’s how many spaces fit around the board, not because of any expectation you’ll get there or because that’s how many were needed. Likewise, Container probably has a lot of 20s because there was space on the card sheet, so they were effectively “free”.  There are a fair number of games where that top denomination bill doesn’t get a lot of play - El Capitan seems another recent example. There are also games where components are short, simply because of a lack of space on a countersheet - some versions of Modern Art have this problem. You’ve struck on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, that of pacing. While they do achieve it in different ways as you note, games share with books and movies the need for good pacing. Sometimes it’s having a clear phasing as the stakes ratchet up, like Modern Art; sometimes it’s a more organic growth or sense of progress, like Container. Some times it’s about the destination, sometimes it’s about the ride. I think there are no pat right answers, although there are plenty of wrong ones. But whether it’s a strong drive towards a resolution, or a situation that simply evolves in interesting ways, for me you have to have something. Compare the original Auf Heller und Pfennig/Kingdoms, a game with no recognizable plot motion whatsoever, with the recent Beowulf: The Movie Boardgame remake to see what a difference it can make. I think writers have a lot more latitude for interesting creativity in this respect. Books can have unexpected twists and turns where the reader may hit a mini-resolution and the plot may go off in an unexpected direction, or whatever, where in a game such a thing might just be considered being randomly jerked around when the goal-posts change. Regardless, I think this idea of pacing and game direction is really important. Posted by Chris Farrell on Jan 8, 2008 at 06:47 PM | #

In our group, scores of 170 and 180 in Container aren’t rare at all :) Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Jan 9, 2008 at 05:08 AM | #

Our winning Container scores have been averaging between 180 and 210.  Once 4 and 5 container loads start to ship with regularity, bids over $20 (and occasionally over $30) are de rigueur. Posted by J C Lawrence on Jan 9, 2008 at 12:58 PM | #

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