Devlog Journal 4

For this week, we went over thinking through games by watching the video "Making it Matter: Lessons from Real Sports (GDC 2013)" where Bennet Foddy explains how real-world sports solved risk and reward problems in game design. Then, we were asked to choose a real-world sports game and make it into a board game. The game I chose to make into a board game was a game called BehCup, a game that is similar to golf but with a target with a set amount of rings. The objective of the game was to score as many goals as you could, the player with the most amount of goals was declared the winner. To earn a goal, you simply had to make it into one of the rings of the target. Each person has 10 rounds, or 10 balls to score as many goals as you can. To make BehCup into a board game, I chose to use a blank piece of paper to write down the target with 3 rings outside the center and then flick/toss 10 bottle caps from a certain area to make some goals. I started off simple, however, it was not very interesting. Bennet Foddy says in (2:37) "Games and sports are basically enjoyable or fun activities, but the outcomes in any sporting activity are fundamentally pretty pointless and arbitrary." My BehCup game felt incomplete and unexciting because while it was a fun activity, the outcome felt too simple for it to matter if I presented it to everyone else in the class. I made a change in my BehCup game by having more courses and using more obstacles to make it harder to flick/toss the bottle caps into the rings. I also added 2 game modes: a 2-D mode where we simply flicked the bottle cap into the rings on the floor while navigating the bottle cap through the obstacles that were placed; and a 3-D mode, where we tossed the bottle caps from a certain area to land them into the rings. By applying these changes, I asked some of my roommates to try out the BehCup game I made and noticed that the outcome matted a lot more when they were involved as well, some of them spectated as well, trash-talking the player that was losing, giving more weight to the outcome of the game, especially if the losing player made a comeback to win the game. Bennet Foddy talks in (6:13) about the second dimension of performance saying "Sports, unlike many games are performative. Your actions within a sport convey meaning to the audience." Bennet Foddy Explains this further by saying that the character of the player and the audience can add more meaning to the sport's outcome. I saw a lot of this as I was seeing a handful of drama over the amount of trash-talking the spectators did towards the players when we played my BehCup game.

We were then asked to be in a group of three and to choose a sport to first make into a playable board game, we were asked to make a prototype and then make the necessary modifications to make the game interesting. The game we chose was Bo-taoshi, a game similar to Capture the Flag but used towers instead. The board game version we made went as follows: It was a two-player game, with each player having their own tower. Each tower had 10 points of health and the person who reached 0 health lost the game. We used Uno cards to use the colors to represent each position the real-world counterpart had, Red meant attack, blue meant defense, yellow meant reinforcements, and green meant walling. To make the final version of the board game version, we wanted to make it the type of game that did not end too quickly but ended fast enough to make the outcome matter more. Bennet Foddy says in (5:47) "You have to perform your moves in a way that is not trivial to do, it's not easy to reproduce the same movements twice in a row."  Bennet Fody says this because it is integral to making a game interesting and it is one of the reasons why sports are so successful. To replicate this in our Bo-taoshi board game, we made sure to give each player different options during their turns, we designed the game so that each player's hand they have is different meaning that their moves will almost always be different.  This is how we made the Bo-taoshi board game in a way that was unpredictable, which was very similar to the real game. We added some balance changes to the game that would make it feel like it was exciting throughout the entirety of the game. When it was our turn to present our game, the feedback we received was pure satisfaction and excitement. It was very similar to when I played my BehCup game with my roommates, it was fun and interesting, but most importantly, the outcome of our Bo-taoshi game mattered to the player and to the audience that watched.