Advanced Play Design - Week 8 - Audience

APD Week 8 - Audience

Theme

Audience

Method

I will be designing a game that focuses on the performative nature of trying to answer a riddle when the other person already knows the answer.

Context

Since working with Helen on our Escape Room idea in Week 4 where we explored Play & Place, I have been thinking more and more about different aspects of Escape Rooms, and trying to identify and interrogate my personal thoughts about them. I have had some good experiences with Escape Rooms and some bad.

When I have been in the position of being locked in an Escape Room and really not understanding at all any of the riddles and puzzles, I have felt a lot of frustration at the fact that I had to ask for clues from the people running them. The more I ask for clues the more I feel like a monkey performing for someone.

I thought it might be fun to try and zoom in on this aspect in this week’s theme.

In this weeks response I am focusing on the pleasure frameworks of Difficulty, Competition and Camaraderie as described in Costello and Edmonds’s A Study in Play, Pleasure and Interaction Design. Using these frameworks as a base I want this game to help develop a sense of fellowship and intimacy between the players, as well as give a defined goal that is challenging and requires skill to complete.

Response

Collating various riddles from riddles.com, I designed a game that works with two teams working together to win. The first team is the group of observers, and the second team is the single person subject. This subject team could be expanded to more players to make the game less difficult.

Each round the observers are presented with three riddles along with their answers, sorted by difficulty (easy riddles equal one point, medium riddles equal two points and difficult riddles equal three points). The observers must decide which riddle to give to the subject, balancing their knowledge of the subject while trying to maximise their points acquired.

There are five rounds and to win the players must acquire ten points.

Reflection

I tested this game out a few times over the last week and am really happy with the responses to it. Testing it with some of my cohort at the MAGI studio showed just how well some of us know each other, which was a really interesting thing to see.

Some of the riddles were English-language based and it was interesting to see people in the observer teams immediately disqualifying them if the person on the subject team was not particularly familiar with English grammar.

I was glad to see that my ideas of how the theme of Audience and Play was highlighted in these games, with the two-pronged effect of the subject player first becoming audience to the observers, and hearing what they had to say about each riddle and how ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ they were, and how ‘oh they definitely won’t get this one’, or ‘yeah let’s give them this one it’s really easy’, the effects of which were really fascinating to see.

When the subject was presented the riddle there was now the performative pressure to figure out the answer quickly, with all eyes watching. The audience has now swapped over to the observer group. I was really happy to see how clear this switch was in my play testing.

Another interesting aspect was seeing how teams reacted to the 10 points in 5 rounds aspect - usually teams would get to the third or fourth round before they started counting up what they had left to get, and how they would go about it. In two different play sessions players in the observer team became very strategic in round four, deciding to give an easier riddle knowing they would be blocking out the easier answers for round five.

References

Costello, B & Edmonds, E 2007, 'A study in play, pleasure and interaction design', proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, pp. 76-91.