Game Design Part 4: Ownership

So when we last addressed what makes a good game we were thinking about choices. I left on the thought that choices are in fact important and they were important because they give the player ownership of the game experience. Today we're going to address why that ownership is important and how it can lead to interesting design. And how playing off of this concept can make some counter intuitive but also good design.

First of all, ownership is most important conceptually in video games, but similar concepts can be translated to board games. The basic idea is that an experience is more enjoyable the more control or the more influence you feel you had over it. This is the basic concept behind something like say, The Sims. Instead of having a story dictated to you as in a novel, a movie, or a TV show, you're creating your own story based on what you tell your Sims to do. That's a pretty simple concept and The Sims executed it pretty damn well (thus the whole best selling game of all time thing).

Somewhat more complicated is games that try to tell a story. The best of those games give the player flexibility in what they can do so that they're not forced along a certain path. The best example of this sort of game would be the Ultima series (or at least 4, 5, 6, and 7). The basic idea in these games was that you were the "Avatar of Virtue" who was called on to deal with great threats to some kingdom. Generic fantasy stuff, really. What made the game interesting was that there really wasn't a set path or really restrictions on what you could do in your attempts to beat the game.

Let's give an example. In Ultima 6, a bunch of gargoyles have taken over the kingdom's eight shrines and are for some reason trying to kill you. You have two missions: 1) free the eight shrines and 2) figure out why they're trying to kill you and make it stop. (As a sidenote: in most games the answer would be to kill all the gargoyles. This game is more about the perils of racism though, so that is not the correct solution.) How you accomplish those goals is completely up to you. There are the "right" ways to do, where you virtuous and help the citizens and solve their problems for them. Or there is an...alternate way in which case you're more of a lawless anti-hero. Or somewhere in between. The point for our purposes is that you have near total control of that experience. Which leads to excellent stories. (If you're ever super bored or are familiar with the Ultima series, read through that series... it's kind of amazing)

Another method of creating ownership is to not tell a story at all. This is the "god game" where you have complete control over something. The Sims and Sim City are the classic examples of this kind of game. In these games it's always up to the player to create their own story, and they're far better games for it. The most recent example of an amazing god game is Dwarf Fortress. It is graphically unsophisticated, but it is an amazing design. The basic idea is this: you get 7 dwarves and your goal is to build them a new society. To do so you need to mine out living areas, build doors, furniture, weapons, traps, grow food, hunt other food, make leather, smelt metal,...

The game itself is fun. Hard to learn, but fun. But the real joy is telling stories about your Dwarf Fortress. In the gaming community, the most infamous such story is Boatmurdered. It's... special. To understand, you really have to read through that series (trust me, it gets really fantastic eventually). For a more personal experience, John recently delighted in telling me about the two dragons he captured. He wanted to have the dragons fight other capture animals to the death to entertain his dwarves. So the first time he let the dragon out of its cage to fight a goblin. The goblin charged up and took one swing with its club...and collapsed the dragon's lung, killing it shortly thereafter. John was extremely annoyed by his craptastic dragon. So he caught another one. This time, he carefully made sure the dragon had time to gather itself before it got in a fight. So he let it go into the arena and it breathed out a huge fireball, roasting everything inside to death. John was very excited by all this, but...

The fireball had caught the room on fire. And the dragon was stuck in the gladiator pit. So it caught on fire. And died. If you're the kind of person who finds frustration like that on some level hilarious, Dwarf Fortress is the game for you.

Personally, I prefer my god games without the painful learning curve, so I love me some Civilization. But the idea is the same: take a civilization from a small tribe just developing the idea of a city to the modern age, preferably taking over the world in the process. There's no story beyond the one you create for yourself. And that's far more enjoyable than just sitting back and watching a movie, for example.

Now, how does one create ownership in a board game? It's basically anything that can get players to tell a story about how they played your game. Sometimes it happens by luck, like the time John was playing Risk and successfully defended Japan with two guys against twenty by a series of ridiculous rolls. That was some 15 years ago and it still comes up at Christmas occasionally.

Other games make more of a point to do it. The game I mentioned at the end of the last post, Acquire, is one of these. So Acquire is a game essentially about hotel chains and investing in them. There's a 9 by 12 grid and players draw from a stack of tiles corresponding to each square on the grid. Each player plays a tile in clockwise fashion. If they play a tile adjacent to another tile (that isn't part of a chain already) they form one of seven hotel chains. After the first such play, each player can buy up to three shares in any hotel on the board. Playing tiles next to an existing hotel makes that chain bigger and more valuable. When two chains come in contact the bigger destroys the smaller, but the owners of shares of the smaller are paid off.

The important thing to remember in this game is that even if you found a hotel, it's not always in your best interest to focus your stock buying and expansion on that hotel. And this is where 1) the game creates ownership and 2) uses that idea of ownership in a clever way. Because the designer understood the psychology that most people who found a hotel would want to focus on it, but made that rarely the best option in terms of playing the game (diversifying and clever timing are the keys), he made an absolutely fantastic game.

So when designing a game, one of the things you really want to think about is this idea of ownership. Can the player create a story for him or herself? If so, you're doing something right. Even if it's a very prosaic story like "I got all the greens and yellows with hotels on them and made that corner of the board a nightmare for everyone else to get through" you've done something right. Or: "I took over South America and then the Colombians invaded Mexico and from there the United States and took over the world!" to name two games that I don't like very much but still get this right.

The absolute easiest way to create ownership? Give the player LOTS of decisions to make. In other words, give them choices!

Next time: thinking about choice and why game design tells fatalism to shove it.