Yesterday afternoon, I finally got the chance to participate in one of GLS‘s weekend “Game Jams.” The last several Saturdays, a number of students (in Educational Technology and the Learning Sciences, primarily), have come in on the weekend for a fun three hour exercise in designing, iterating, and playtesting games. Provided with a theme (this week’s was “Valentine’s Day”) and a number of game elements (ranging from a Go board to index cards to dominoes), each team has one hour to design a game from inception to a playable state, then the games are played and critiqued by everyone.

Yesterday fell on Valentine’s Day, so that became this week’s theme. As you can see by some of the initial ideas (my favorite is “we put the cute back in ‘execute’”), the initial ideas ran the gamut from relatively traditional (love, romance, relationships) to the gorily surreal (Valentine’s Day Massacre, decapitation), and what are probably the most common single person’s responses to this “holiday” (drinking, depression).

After a few minutes of milling about, it became clear that Kevin Harris and I had similar ideas about how to proceed — we both felt that doing something baesd around a love triangle could be fun, and appropriating elements of Apples to Apples could be a good place to start. So, we paired up and began hashing out the game; we started with Apples to Apples and built from there, trying a number of board game modifications, including using a chess board and making players “race” to one side or another, but it just didn’t seem to work. I grabbed a pile of hexagonal tiles from the game Polygon, and instead of making a game in which players moved around on a pre-existing board, started thinking of the game as something similar to Carcassonne, in which a board gets built by players as they proceed in the play of the game.

This opened up the idea that not only could players build the board (and move around on it), but that they could remove tiles as they went along. This ended up leading us to the game that would eventually be known as “Temptation Island” (apologies to Fox/Newscorp; please don’t sue me). In this game, the goal becomes to force one of the other three players onto their own “island” (set of tiles, disconnected from the other two players’ tiles), such as a configuration like this:

… in which yellow has lost, and the other two players have won. I’ve written up detailed rules for the game and posted it to the Game Jam’s website. Here’s a taste of the write-up:

This week’s theme was “Valentine’s Day,” and taking a little bit of a cynical view on all of it, Kevin and I wondered: What if what was important in a love triangle wasn’t hooking up with someone, but making sure you weren’t the one who wasn’t hooked up with? (Yes, that’s a double negative). This game is for three players — no more, no less — and requires strategically thinking about whose answers best “fit” yours, while also figuring out how to screw over (or not be screwed over) by the other two in the crazy love triangle.

It worked out okay! However, it turns out I’m also really terrible at playing a game I co-designed. After a playtest, it seems that a good strategy is to play the “long game”: Not remove any tiles from the board for quite a while, as there just aren’t many paths to escape being left on your own “island” without a larger board. Also, I think it would be interesting to see how this game might proceed if the central mechanic wasn’t one ripped off of Apples to Apples — what other ways of forcing a player to make a meaningful choice between the other players might be fun?

The other games were cool, too — Matt, Garrett, and Peter designed a rather violent card-based drinking game/”dating game” (?) which was both hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Ryan and Brendan made a dice-based strategy game based on a battle between the Queen of Hearts and St. Valentine, with tiles for different classes of characters (e.g., “assassins”), and mechanics for combat. But, we spent the most time working on John and Jim’s game — “Lust n’ Love”:

Those two have a lot of experience designing “local games” and place-based games with Kurt Squire, so it’s no surprise that they designed one which required a lot of running around in the Teacher Education Building. We tied up the elevators and the stairwell for a few minutes, running up and down the stairs, trading cards, making a lot of noise, and generally having a lot of fun. After running through it once, we critiqued and iterated their design as a group — changing the card-exchange rule, and clarifying a number of the other rules.

Overall, the Game Jam was a ton of fun, and if anyone in Madison is reading my blog, I recommend showing up on a Saturday (check out the site for updates on when and where; maddesigners.org) and giving this a try. It’d been a long while since I’d played around with designing paper/pencil/board games. When I get the chance to teach a games and learning class, exercises such as this will be some of the first things students will do — designing a game in this fashion helps one to learn how to design a simple but productive set of game mechanics before worrying about fancy graphics, or any form of technological implementation.

Also, it struck me later that the practice of getting your hands dirty designing a game for a theme also may give rise to all sorts of interesting ways to explore how narrative and ludic elements of a game interrelate. The ludologists were right — games are sets of rules, but what I found interesting was how they interacted with the story or theme of a game. In “Temptation Island,” the “strand one player on an island” endstate of the game, for instance, leads to a strange implication for the central conceit of the game: Successful “love” in the game ain’t a goal state, it’s avoiding being “unloved”! Playing around with game mechanics leads to sometimes weird, but interesting narrative implications.

Anyway, I’ll be showing up for more of these Game Jams, and probably blogging the results again. It was a lot of fun!

Update: John’s posted detailed rules for the “Lust n’ Love” game and some thoughts on yesterday’s jam at his blog. Check it out!