A game that caught my interest while scrolling through the list of games presented at IndieCade 2021 was a Tabletop RPG by the name of “Anyone can Wear the Mask”, developed by Jeff Stormer. This is a role-playing game where three players play as the Hero, the Villain, and the City, and each role has their own characteristics and control. It’s a game about superheroes where every life matters and every decision counts. I, for one, am a big fan of the superhero genre, and so I decided to give it a try. I gathered two of my friends, both of whom have never played a TTRPG in their life before, and we got started. I played as the City, the role really dedicated to being the Gamemaster. I controlled who lived where, the districts and neighborhoods of the city, and the overall narrative being played out. My friend Eric was the Villain, a role where he could control the dangers of the city and the criminal underground that held power over the city. My friend Riley played the Hero, the role dedicated to saving and protecting the innocents around him. He had less overall control than the City and the Villain, but his reactions to what transpired had an effect on the people around him as he created his legacy. We had a blast playing the game. The hero of our story was a man by the name of Hillbert Billy Bob, a dude given great gifts after being bitten by a radioactive homeless man. He could throw himself at great speeds while curling himself into a ball. He was the man known as the Pinball, a force of good in the dastardly city of New Boston, a cyberpunk city where the Yakuza and Mafia call their home. While Hunjuku Japan and Big Italy had their own sections of the city, Jiggle Street and Diamond City played their own role into making New Boston what it eventually turned out to be. The villain of the story was the Kirkinator, a test-tube clone of the late Charlie Kirk who could turn others into Charlie Kirk using his blood. His goal was to turn to whole city into Kirk’s in order to carry the flame, honor the gospel, and fight for his name. The story was stupid as fuck, but we had a hilarious time playing the game. As mentioned before, Riley and Eric had never played a TTRPG before, so at first, we had a rough start, but they were both able to get into it, and we entered a flow state where ideas kept bouncing off of each other left and right. Eventually, we had a deep lore that explained everything around the city. We haven’t finished it yet, but from what we have played, we created a narrative that all three of us were invested in using the game’s mechanics, a card flip that determines what actions will take place in the day in the life of the hero. Cards drawn would influence who was in danger, what the danger was, and where it was taking place. It could take place in an area unknown to the hero, or in the hero’s backyard. The actions of the hero were influenced by dice rolls that determined whether or not the person in danger was saved. If the person was saved, the hero’s legacy increased, and he became an icon to the city. If the person died, the hero had to mourn and reflect on his failures to those he swore to protect. As we played, the decisions we made did take an effect on us, and whenever someone couldn’t be saved, we had a moment of silence. This RPG really put us into the shoes of our dedicated roles. I felt like I was affected whenever we created a new piece of lore. I changed and developed over the course of the game depending on what happened. Riley also was affected by his decisions and his role. He wanted to become a change in the city, and so his reactions to the gameplay reflected that. Eric had a fun time being the villain, and crafting lore for his character for sure helped him get more comfortable in the game space than he was at the beginning of the game. As mentioned before, we haven’t finished our run yet, but we are so invested by the story and the mechanics that we have to finish it, and we will, because this game is really good. I give it 4.5/5 stars.
harris.bra
Artwork #4: Mega Awesome Lion Cafe
Over the past summer, I travelled to Japan for a dialogue with Northeastern University. On that trip, I learned many new words, experienced authentic Japanese culture, and tried many, many different foods. It was a great experience and one that I would definitely recommend to others. One thing, however, that I tried on this trip made me slightly concerned. In Japan, there are many questionable concepts around the country. One of them are these small places called pet cafes. Basically, as the name suggests, these pet cafes are places where customers can come in and hang out with many different animals. A lot of these places involves relatively domesticated animals such as kittens, puppies, and piglets. These animals roam around an enclosed area and come up to customers to give them a great time.
I went to a cafe with pigs, and the tiny piglets were adorable, but the one thing that concerned me the most appeared as my friends and I searched for a pet cafe to go to. One of the top results on our Google Search was an otter cafe. An OTTER Cafe. Remember how earlier, I had said that most of the cafes had relatively domesticated animals that you could find in your home. Well, otters are anything but that. While cute, they are animals who are meant to be swimming in rivers and exploring forests, not sitting inside a small room with tens of strangers. And on top of that, once the cafe is closed for the day, where do these otters sleep? How do they have enough room to sleep and is there habitat accommodating for otters. The answer is probably not. A lot of pet cafes, as it turns out, do not have the safest or most humane living conditions for their animals. A lot of them live in tiny cages where movement is limited, and they can often be starved to make them seem small and cute. While we were appalled by an otter cafe, we also found owl cafes, capybara cafes, and many other questionable places. It made me wonder “How can all of these places keep up with the competition while also accommodating for their animals?” Businesses are known for cutting corners whenever they can, especially when it comes to beating out their opponents, and so I wanted to explore that in a game.
Mega Awesome Lion Cafe was my idea for my Artwork #4. This game involves becoming the owner of a new lion cafe and choosing whether to prioritize taking care of your lions or maximizing your profits, but not both. The gameplay involves managing your business through several different means. First off, you can manage your individual lions that each come with their own stats, including their name, their gender, their morale, and their star power. Their star power affects how many fans can be generated each year, while their morale affects how many of those fans actually stick around due to how well the lions behave. Each lion also comes with a set care cost that must be paid each year to properly care for the lion. Lions also have a cost to feed, which can be determined by the player. The player can decide how much to feed the lions each year. Feeding a lion more food causes their morale to increase, but is also more expensive, while feeding a lion less food decreases morale but saves the player money. In my playtests that I undertook, at first, players had no trouble feeding their lions the maximum that they could, but once they acquired more and more lions, they had trouble scrolling through each one and feeding them all the way, and so they stopped. This was the exact experience I wanted players to have. I wanted the number of lions to be so overwhelming that the more lions a player had, the more lions suffered while also the more money was generated.
Along with managing lions, players can also buy lions from a black market. These lions are generated, and at first, only lower-level star power lions could be bought, but as the game progressed, players could buy a professional hunter that could go out into the Savannah and hunt higher star power lions. But the black market is not the only way to acquire more lions. Once a player has two lions of different genders, they can be bred to make a lion kitten, which the player could name themselves. This breeding system allowed for players to acquire lions at no extra cost, but because there was no cost, players could create as many new lions as they wanted, which added to experience of overwhelming players with the number of lions they had in their cafe. I wanted them to realize that there was not an easy way to take care of them AND make money, and it was evident in my playtests that I did a decent job at that.
Another system I integrated into the game was an upgrade system that could be used to upgrade the cafe and several different ways. These upgrades gave certain buffs to the player/lions, while also negatively impacting certain aspects as well. For instance, players could invest in premium food for either the lions or the customers. If the player chose the lions, lion morale would increase, but customers would then get worse food and would therefore pay less to the cafe. On the other hand, if players, decided to purchase premium food for customers, customers would pay more money, but lion morale would go down. These types of choices influence how a player played the game, and through my playtests, I found that these decisions were not easy to make. All of these systems combined to create an experience that taught players the ups and downs of owning one of these pet cafes, but I found through feedback that it also taught players to dirty side of business, where cutting corners and taking shortcuts usually leads to someone or something being hurt. Overall, I believe I did a decent job at executing my idea and creating a relevant experience for players.
Artwork #3: Tomfoolery
Impractical Jokers has always been one of my favorite shows that I have ever watched. From its breathtaking comedy to its tense, and sometimes stressful, moments, it is a must watch show. The basic premise of Impractical Jokers is that there are four lifelong friends who continuously try to embarrass each other. They compete in challenges where either one, two, or all four guys are out in very social settings and must do and say whatever the other guys tell them to do. They could be forced to go up to a stranger and ask them for directions to a made-up place, or they might have to get someone to sign a wacky petition on letting children eat glue sticks. These challenges make up the show, and the comedy is built off of each guy. If the main guy participating does not want to do something, they fail the challenge. The ones who are able to do what they are told succeed at the challenge. At the end of each episode, the man with the most fails is considered the “big loser” and must face a punishment which they CANNOT, under ANY circumstances, say NO. Some punishments include getting a new tattoo chosen by the other guys or shaving your head and eyebrows and then changing your license photo. The show is a great watch, but what they are really doing is playing a game, and I wanted to try and simulate that game in normal life.
Tomfoolery is the game that I created with inspiration from Impractical Jokers, and it involves players taking turns to perform tasks in social spaces with random strangers. First, the number of players can vary, but it works best with 3 or more players. The game includes a deck of cards with tasks written on it. One thing about Impractical Jokers is while the jokes they make on the show aren’t outright harmful, they can border the line between harmless at best and at least antagonistic at worst. I didn’t want to create a game that was antagonistic towards random people, especially in the modern age of content creation where random “influencers” will antagonize or bully innocent people for the sake of “content.” That type of stuff really irks me, and so I wanted to create tasks that were harmless and more fun for the strangers. Some tasks I created were:
- Get a selfie with a stranger
- Crumple a ball of paper and get someone to be the hoop that you throw it into.
- Do 50 consecutive lunges forward
- Get a double high-five AND a double low-five both from a stranger.
- Arm Wrestle a stranger
These tasks do not encourage players to be obnoxious or antagonistic to society but instead aim to get players to interact with society at a friendly level. I live with the philosophy that one smile a day will keep the Grim Reaper away, and so I try to make people laugh, or even smile. daily. You don’t ever know what someone could be going through, and so putting a smile on their face could make all the difference. Regardless, players play in a circle. One player draws a card and then must do what is on that card for a specific number of points. If they refuse to do what is on the card, it becomes fair game for any player to do with an increased point value. If no one wants to do the task, the card is discarded. If a player does a task or the task is discarded, the player counterclockwise to the previous player can now draw a card and the process continues. When a full circle rotation has been completed, a round has passed. Players can play for as many rounds as they want, and the player with the most points by the end of all of the rounds wins.
Tomfoolery has a very simple gameplay loop that makes or breaks depending on the level of comfort players have in social settings. I believe that it can be used to help people ease into being around others and communicating with strangers. I, for one, am someone who has a hard time talking to people I don’t know, but playtesting Tomfoolery helped me get out of that comfort zone. I had a blast playtesting with my friends, and I know others would have a blast playing as well.
Artwork #2: Hall of Heartbreak
Over the summer, I got broken up with. It was for a myriad of reasons, but it was a three year long relationship, and so it stung and was hard to go through. But the cherry on top, however, was that I got broken up with via a text message due to our relationship being long distance, and so there was no intimate sit down, no tears to comfort, and no emotional send off. It was just a paragraph of text on my phone screen telling me that I’m too good for her and she doesn’t deserve me and blah blah blah. And so, when we were in class and assigned a project based on appropriation, one thing stuck in my mind: If anything, even a urinal, can be considered “art”, then so can a break-up/apology/confession text. They’re pieces of writing, they can be analyzed, and they even have tropes (“It’s not you, it’s me”, etc.). So, if they are “art”, they can be appropriated, and that is where the idea for “Hall of Heartbreak” came from.
Hall of Heartbreak is a fill-in-the-blank transformative game where players take breakup/confession/apology texts and convert them into comical works of art. It is heavily inspired by the Dada art movement of the 1900s, and it serves to lighten up what would otherwise be very sensitive messages. My piece is also heavily inspired by the game “Mad Libs,” which takes this same concept but applies it to short stories instead. From the Dada movement, I am a huge fan of taking objects that have some sort of traditional meaning and transforming them into nonsense, like with Michael Duchamp’s Fountain, which takes a urinal and transforms it into a fountain, or at least what looks like a fountain. I personally would never drink out of it, but it takes the meaning of an object and flips it on its head, like with my game.
Gameplay is simple. Players will first choose a text message to edit. I have hand selected three texts that I believe fit into the game. “I’m sorry about Hulk Hogan” is the aforementioned break-up text I received over the summer, “Can we honestly e-date” is an anonymous confession text I found while searching for appropriate texts to put in this game, and “Dear Sandy, I’m sorry” is an apology/confession text that I had sent my crush in 8th grade (and yes I did scroll through the depths of hell to find this). Players will then be given a type of word on screen with examples of that type. Players will come up with a word that is of the word type on screen and then type it into the chat. A new word type will then pop up, and players must repeat the process until all of the word types have been displayed. Once the final word is entered, the player words will be placed into the original text message and will then be displayed onto the screen for the player to enjoy.
Artwork #1: See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Speak Nothing
“See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Speak Nothing” is a communication game where three players must cooperate to follow a set of instructions. The twist? One player cannot see, one player cannot hear, and one player cannot speak. It is a very simple constriction, but as shown through playtesting, can be very difficult to follow. Players must work together with limited forms of communication to walk over to another person and get their favorite ice cream flavor, but these restrictions complicate that, as the players struggle to communicate with each other what has to be done.
When I was formulating where to take my score game, I was reminded of the Three Wise Monkeys in Japanese culture, represented by the phrase “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” These monkeys were symbols for the complexities of human nature and ethical living, and represented how sometimes it is hard to live your life doing the right thing all the time, and it even poses the question of “What is the right thing to do?” I thought I could translate that over into my score by getting to players to really think about what their objective is. Players must come to terms with the “right” way to play the game and can choose to follow the directions in whatever manner they please. I was also inspired by my job as a baker. At work, I am with several different groups of people, ranging from coworkers drastically older than me to coworkers who speak an entirely different language. This makes communication hard, especially in an environment that thrives from good communication and teamwork. In spaces like these, it is important to know how to communicate in ways that aren’t just speaking, and so this game also helps build upon those skills.
