Experimental Game Design

clee28

by | Dec 6, 2024 |

Rules

High School

Rules:

To Start:

    1. Every player needs a sheet of paper and a pencil for a “Resume” 
    2. Something to mark the players on the board
    3. Two Dice
  • DO NOT LOOK AT CARDS

Game Play:

    1. First everyone roles to find there GPA and SAT:
      1. To role for GPA you role both dice, you begin with a baseline of 2.8 and multiply your role by 0.1 and add that to the 2.8 (a 10 would be 2.8 + 0.1×10 = 3.8)
      2. SAT has a baseline of 1000 and you multiply 50 times the dice role and add it (a 10 would be 1000 + 50×10 = 1500)
      3. You write both your GPA and SAT on your resume
    2. After certain squares on the board there are circles, you stop at these circles no matter what your role is and re-role and continue on your next turn
    3. Role to see the number of spaces you move, if you land on a square write it down on your resume and do nothing until the end of the game unless stated below
  • The only squares you do anything on in game are:
      1. SAT and GPA
      2. Fail class, Senioritis, Get In a Fight:
        1. On these squares you immediately role, if you roll doubles or an odd number you get minus 1 full GPA point if not nothing happens
      3. How many apps: You simply roll both die and whatever you get is the number of schools you applied to, write it down
  • Change GPA or SAT: You can choose to re-roll for your GPA and SAT if you land on these squares, this is done the same way as before
    1. Get in ED: Skip to the end

End of Game:

    1. Flip over cards corresponding to what you landed on, if you roll even it comes true if you roll odd it does not.
      1. These cards have points that can change your GPA, Happiness, and your “Application Score” tally these up they will all affect what school you go to
  • Only when everyone is done with can you finally reveal the finish card, do as it says to find out your college

Authors Note

For my fourth and final artwork, I decided to recreate one of the most stressful experiences I have been through, and one that any college student can relate to…college applications. My board game which is simply called Senior Years does its best to depict the decisions, choices, and opportunities you have while in your Senior Year. A few of the squares you can land on are definitely far fetched, such as “Cure Cancer,” but these are just to add to the intentionally dramatic and infuriating ending. The game works by giving each player a resume. Throughout the game players will add things to their resumes like their GPAs, SAT scores, and potential extracurricular activities. What all of these are is completely decided by luck, you also may land on something and not end up getting it. There are both positive and negative things that can happen, you can become valedictorian or fail a class, in theory you could do both in the same game. At the end of the game you find out your “results” by adding up the scores measured based on your decisions. The methods of scoring are GPA, SAT, and arbitrary scoring methods called “Happiness Points” and “Application Points.” Some outcomes can have both negative and positive impacts for example if you go to a party your GPA may decrease but your happiness goes up. What players do not know while playing the game is that everything is entirely pointless.

I feel very fortunate to have gotten into Northeastern. While I had good grades, a very good ACT score, and fairly impressive extracurriculars (this is not me boasting just a reference) colleges often seem to just pick whomever they want sometimes at random. Some of my best friends back home who are much more impressive than me on paper never got into the schools they wanted. This is not to say they went to bad schools, just schools that were below their academic potential. While they all love their schools now, when decisions first came out so many people were upset over unexpected results. I wanted my game to mimic this. When you come to the end you find out it was all completely random and you have a process of rolling the dice to figure out where you end up. Obviously this is satirical and not how the admissions process works, but to a high school senior getting rejected from their dream school it seems that way.

While this was an experience project I used two main pieces of appropriation in my work. The first was a pizza box. My entire game was designed to be stored in and be made on a pizza box. This I stole from Allan Kaprow and one of our first lessons in a way. I wanted to make something out of a found object to add a little bit of creativity into it. The lesson I am referring to is the outdoor lesson we did where we made scores and games out of random objects people had brought. This was an aspect I had not yet incorporated into one of my artworks, and so I did. The other thing I appropriated was The Game of Life. This was less intentional. I wanted to make a board game, I decided that when I settled on using a found object to make the board. At the time I had a loose idea about wanting to make it about college applications but could not think of how to do that. I thought about various board games that I had played, and I eventually realized that the timeline way that The Game of Life is played would be perfect to portray applying to and hearing back from colleges. The board game aspect allowed me a little bit extra artistic license with the look which was mildly scary so I kept it simple enough to wear it looked nice, but did not do too much extra in fear of messing it up. Overall I am proud of the concept and production of my final artwork.

 

Gateway-Intervention

by | Nov 18, 2024 | ,

The game I designed is called Gateway. The idea behind the game is very simple. One person pays to get onto the T and everyone else tries to follow. You try to see how many people you can get through to the T without paying. Technically this is illegal so you should be careful when playing, but it is most likely something that almost everyone has done. If you do get caught the odds are that no one is going to get too mad at you and will most likely just make you pay again. Interestingly enough I got this idea when I was home in New York. The New York City MTA loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year due to people hopping the turnstile. Many native New Yorkers who are younger refuse to pay most of the time that they ride the subway instead electing to jump straight over. This causes the government to raise prices on tickets and even raise taxes in order to provide the people with public transit. In the end that means that the people who do pay are paying more for the people who do not. Morally this is wrong however typically the people who would pay are going to be the ones who are more financially stable. This is why it ends up being younger people who are jumping over. In Boston you typically cannot jump over due to the design of the gates however it is easy to walk through after the person in front of you. If no one is around to get you in trouble then who cares. My game involves getting as many people through the gate as possible without getting caught before the gate closes. The record…6. I have probably done more in my time here in Boston but my friends and I rarely take the T anymore and did not feel like getting caught during play testing.

The idea is inspired by DADA. The T is more important for some people than others, for some it may be to go downtown to go on a shopping spree, but for others it could be commuting to work where you are underpaid and you have to spend hundreds of dollars each year that you cannot afford to lose. DADA often stood up against the government for various ideas they did not support, often being anti-regime. I believe this does the same thing. In some way it is meant to symbolize how there is a level of inequality in the payment of the T. Not everyone is paying what they can afford to pay yet they are paying nonetheless because they have to use it. While there is no real solution to this it does seem unfair that people pay the same amount regardless of whether or not they are able to. Transportation is a necessity and while it needs to be funded, some who need to use it cannot afford the build up that it is costing them.

Poker for Kids

by | Oct 23, 2024 | ,

Materials:

  1. Two Decks of Uno Cards
    1. Keep the first one normal and take all action cards out of the second deck
      1. The first deck will from here on out be the “normal” deck
      2. The second deck will be the “family” deck
  2. Friends
  3. Poker Chips (If gambling, not recommended)

 

Rules:

  1. Played from 2-8 Players
  2. Know the rules of Texas Holdem, the only difference is the uno cards have action
  3. Take all skip cards out of the normal deck they have no value in this game
  4. The game begins like normal Texas Holdem, whoever the dealer is, will deal two cards to everyone from the normal deck
  5. After looking at there cards players may have a few options
    1. If they have a +2 they play it and draw two cards from the family deck
    2. If they have a +4 they play it and draw four cards from the deck
      1. It can then be kept and used as a wild (see below)
    3. If they have a reverse they may choose to switch hands with one other player after everyone has played their action cards
    4. If they have a wild, they may draw one card and keep the wild
      1. The wild card can now be played in conjunction with any card in order to change its color to whatever the player would like
      2. It can only be used on the cards in their hand
    5. If they have none of these cards they may keep their hand and play as normal
    6. Any cards action cards discarded should go into a discard pile specifically for the normal deck
  6. PLAYERS MAY HAVE NO MORE THAN 5 CARDS AT A TIME
    1. If a player ends up with 6 or more cards they must discard a card of their choosing into a discard pile for the deck that they got it from
  7. Then the first round of betting occurs
  8. From here on out the hand is played exactly like omaha poker except with 5 cards instead of 4

 

Artist Statement

 

When I debuted this game idea in class I said I chose it because poker is one of my favorite games and by all means this is true, but I also wanted to make something complicated. The game I made is fun by all means but there is no real reason to play it. People do not typically play a game like poker for the sake of enjoyment but usually because they enjoy the thrill of winning money. If you take the monetary aspect out of it the game itself is not fun because each hand loses all value. People do not want to play a game that takes poker and makes it more complicated because there is no point to that while betting. That is why when I played with my friends we tried playing with and without betting. While we thought the action card aspect made the game unnecessarily complicated while gambling, when playing without money we actually enjoyed it more than we would traditional poker. You see when playing poker without money there is no real skill involved because there is no way to keep score, however when playing with the uno cards, there is skill depending on your use of action cards to make hands and deciding what cards to keep and which to drop. I will say while it is better than classic poker without gambling in general we all enjoyed classic poker with gambling more. 

I did think it was interesting to combine two things that would not typically go together. Poker is typically seen as a game for adults. In most states including Massachusetts you have to be 21 to even step foot inside of a casino. Uno however, while being enjoyed by people of all ages, is typically regarded and marketed as a kids game. Putting the two juxtaposing games together felt like something Dada might do. Similar to taking the Mona Lisa and drawing a mustache on it, I took a serious game like poker and added a color and a childish aspect to it. 

This game involved rounds and rounds of play testing and I do not think it is possible to make it better than either of the originals however it is enjoyable nonetheless, so why I failed I do not regret the idea.

To Jason

by | Sep 27, 2024 |

Score

Find A Piece of Papyrus and a Quill with ink

Using the Quill and ink make 25 dots on the paper

Number the dots randomly 1-25

In order connect the dots starting with 1

Ask a Friend If They Like it

If No:

Rip up the Papyrus

If yes:

Wait until their birthday, frame it, wrap it, and gift it to them

Original Score

There is actually very little reason to mention my original score as it had nothing to do with my final score but I thought it was also a good idea. The idea behind it was that very basic instructions would tell you how to play a certain chord on the guitar. The reason I liked this idea so much was because if I wanted to I could continue to make the score go further and further and get harder and harder by introducing new chords and strumming patterns. In short it would have become a very basic instruction guide on how to play the guitar. I scrapped this because no matter how specific and basic I got with the instructions to the score I was somewhat worried that without someone showing you how to play an instrument through a video or in person it can be hard. I figured without some sort of model there was a good chance that in practice the score did not succeed.

Final Score

This score was designed with Yoko Ono in mind. I liked the somewhat sadistic way she had extremely negative outcomes in many of her scores, however some of them were just too depressing for me (I have no desire to have the reader shoot through 100 panes of glass and send a map of each pane once a day to someone who hurt them). So I gave it a dual ending where my score can end positively or negatively. She also gave me the idea to use random objects in my piece which is why I specifically used the papyrus and quill instead of pen and paper, just to make it more fun. However I had two other sources of inspiration. It was my roommate’s birthday over the weekend. While we never do anything big for each other we always get each other small gifts (take them out to dinner, golfing, etc.). This year we did end up going golfing, but I thought that it would be interesting to dedicate this artwork to finding his next birthday gift. This leads me to my second source of inspiration. Connect the dots is a trivial and simplistic way of drawing. It is something that preschool children enjoy because turning a seemingly random pattern of dots into a picture is cool at that age. Last week I saw one of these books at CVS and I thought what if you take a seemingly random series of dots and turn it into something even more sporadic and crazy. Combining this and my minimal desire to go out and buy birthday gifts for people and you get my score. Originally called “Bad Friend” has now been retitled “To Jason.”