Production 4: Getting-meta (about being the best astronaut)
For context, I will provide a short overview of the game my group made. We tentatively (I think) called the game Be the Best Astronaut: it is a three-versus-one multiplayer game where three players play as astronauts, and one plays as "the alien". The three astronauts' goal is to conserve fuel, the game's primary resource, and combust as much of it as possible, therefore traveling across the galaxy the most. Whichever astronaut uses thirty fuel first, wins. Each astronaut receives one fuel per turn, and fuel canisters, worth five fuel, dropped at random location across the map, based on a die-roll. The alien, meanwhile, must try to "infect" all three astronauts. However, they can only move based on a random die-roll of one to three. If the alien infects all three astronauts before they can combust thirty fuel, the alien wins. If an astronaut combusts thirty fuel before the alien infects everyone, that player wins. Thinking about Be the Best Astronaut in relation to other games, it seems to be a weird hybrid between the four-versus-one competition of Turtle Rock's Evolve, the "Galactic Conquest" mode from Pandemic Studios' 2005 Star Wars: Battlefront II, and the board design of Trivial Pursuit.
In terms of learning-through-making Be the Best Astronaut, and relating back to Fullerton's book, I learned that comprehending the core mechanic of one's game is essential to effectively realizing said game. Fullerton writes, "we suggest that you do not begin production without a deep understanding of your player experience goals and your core mechanic—the central activity of your game." (11) I came to grasp this idea the hard way because, when our group initially developed the concept of the game, we did not have a core mechanic in place. In its final state, the core mechanic of Be the Best Astronaut is finding and expending fuel. However, that is not how we originally prototyped the game: at the start, the core mechanic was to simply avoid the alien. Therefore, without devoting ourselves to a core mechanic, we had to go through many iterations of the game just to find identify the mechanic we ended up sticking to. Once we did decide on our core mechanic, the game formed naturally around it. I can say, then, that I learned to take Fullerton's warning more seriously in the future.
Furthermore, I gained a better understanding of the role of play and players more generally in creating meaning in games. Fullerton notes play happens when players, "use imagination, fantasy, inspiration, social skills, or other more free-form types of interaction to achieve objectives within the game space, to play within the game," (34) often in ways that developers did not "intend". This happened to my group: during our playthrough of Be the Best Astronaut, the alien player infected two astronauts. After the infections, the three astronauts began to strategize cooperatively to prevent the alien from infecting the last person, and thus winning the game. When we designed the game, we thought it was competitive. Nevertheless, this situation showed us that play allows for "free-form types of interaction" that can change the meanings of games radically. In other words, play turned Be the Best Astronaut from a competitive experience into a semi-cooperative one. I also began to think about the "roles" of players. I began to see that, if players took to the cooperative aspects of the game, perhaps Be the Best Astronaut could even be redesigned as a purely cooperative game. In all, then, I learned that games can be transformed and shaped by play, transformations that designers can, and perhaps ought to, consider. I realized that Gonzalo Frasca's (2003) statement that game designers, "give away part of their control over their work [through play]," (229) is precisely accurate.
Connecting Fullerton to McBride and Nolan and Jenson, examining and testing the role of resources when designing Be the Best Astronaut made me critically analyze the "literacy" of my own game. In Be the Best Astronaut, there are four resources: turns, fuel, fuel drops, and lives. When considering Fullerton's query "what exactly is a resource?" (72), I started to ask the question, "what are the resources of Be the Best Astronaut "saying" to people?" What are they "teaching" them? This made me notice that, because Be the Best Astronaut's objectives encourage spending as much fuel as possible, it may actually espouse a message about fuel itself. By saying the players that they ought to use fuel as a win-condition, the game's "hidden curriculum" suggests that using fuel is positive and has no consequences. In the context of climate change and pollution, these rules may not be optimal. We did not realize this when playing the game, but when reflecting on the role of resources in this assignment, these issues came to light. Thus, I think, through play, I was able to flex my "critical media literacies", as Jenson et al. (2018) call them. I began to perceive how simple design choices like resources can communicate ideas to players while I actually created these choices (710).
Playing, designing, and critically reflecting on Be the Best Astronaut has led me to ponder questions too many to discuss on this page: what are the storytelling possibilities of the universe we have created? How do the game's procedures work? Why would players be compelled to play the game, and what are the rewards? What did the game teach me about conflict, balance, iteration, and objects, objectives, and system interaction? Put differently, through the act of designing, I was able to learn how to better make games, how to better "read" them, and how to think about them in ways I had not contemplated before.
Works Cited
Frasca, G. (2003). "Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology", The Video Game Theory Reader: Routledge.
Fullerton, T. (2014). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovation Games. NY: Taylor & Francis.
Thumlert, K., de Castell, S., & Jenson, J. (2018). "Learning through game design: A production pedagogy", The 2018 European Conference on Games Based Learning Book: ACPI Press.
