Learn the Fun-damentals of Game Design by Making a Board Game in 1 Day!

1. Introduction: If you're watching this, you are a creative person. You design things, but you haven't designed a game before. Also, you think you have ideas, you have stories to tell, and what if a game could be the medium to tell those stories, to make your ideas playable, to let people explore different perspectives, different outcomes? What if making that game didn't have to take you weeks or months, but it could be done in a day? That's what I want to teach you. How to make your first game, to express your ideas in as little as one day. My name is Matteo and I make games. I design board games, co-operative board games, the ones in which all players work together to explore big challenges like tackling the climate crisis. I've been making games at the Vienna Museum in London and taught game design at universities around the UK. But I haven't studied game design. I actually studied graphic design. I'm going to teach you how I learned to make games by taking existing games and then hacking them with my own ideas, my own concerns, my own questions, and turning them into new games. Then I'm going to teach you how to analyze games and break down their mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. In other words, you will learn to analyze how games work, how people react to them, and how they feel while they play. Then you're going to take an existing board game and break it apart, deconstruct it, hack it with your own ideas so that you can turn it into a new game. You'll do that with stuff that you probably already have at home. In this class, you will get step-by-step guidance, printable worksheets to guide you through the design process, and fun activities, actually hacktivities. But I'm not going to teach you how to code or how to use game-making apps. What I'm going to do is teach you how to think like a game designer and how to make your ideas playable so that by the end of this class, you will have a playable prototype that you can playtest with your friends, with your family, with your colleagues, and maybe even strangers. The game design skills that you will learn and practice are both fun and purposeful. Because analyzing interactive systems, coming up with ideas, prototyping those ideas, and then playtesting them. These are all skills that you can apply to pretty much anything that is designed for humans. Let's make some games. 2. You are already a game designer!: [MUSIC]. Before we dive in, I want to address a couple of limiting beliefs that tend to come up a lot when people start their game making journey. The first limiting belief is, making games is going to be hard because I have never made games before. Are you thinking that? Well, my answer would be, are you sure? Because that depends on what we mean by making and games. Let's think about your childhood for a moment. I bet that as a child, you have at least once come up with playful ways to re-imagine the world around you. Everyday objects have become props for your stories in which you play the role of villain, or a hero, or anything in-between. That's not game design? Let's think about something more conventionally gaming like a board game. I bet that you have at least once changed the rules of a game to make it easier for you to win, or to make it easier for a younger player to play. See whenever you're not playing by the rules, you're making the rules, and that's game design. You're not a stranger to that. The second limiting belief is about not having good ideas. That's possibly the most dangerous one and so we'll need to tackle that one first in this class. Thing is, in order to have good ideas, you need to come up with a lot of ideas, and learn how not to write them off immediately. You know that voice that creeps up and says, that's not a good idea, or that's not going to work. We need to stop listening to it, at least while we're generating ideas. One trick we'll practice is coming up with a lot of bad ideas, bad on purpose. That trick will help you quiet that voice and also appreciate that your ideas are not that bad after all. The first project in this class will be a warm-up to reawaken your inner game designer and to generate a lot of game ideas. [MUSIC]. 3. Hacking?! Let’s hack rock-paper-scissors: This project is a warm up for you to reawaken your inner game designer and to come up with a lot of game ideas. We'll do that by hacking a game that you already know rock paper scissors. Hacking. What do I mean by that? To hack game means to chop off metaphorically some of its rules and then add new rules. Nothing criminal just a fun way to understand how a game works, to break down its components and then putting them back together with new ideas. So rock paper scissors such a simple game. Behind that simplicity there's actually a very elegant balance because each one of these three elements is stronger than one, but weaker than the other. They're all connected by a theme so that the three moves makes sense. For example, scissors can cut through a paper, but they're blunted by rock. So who said that there can only be three elements though. What if there were more or less? What if there were different things, than stationary and stone could be, people, could be animals, could be abstract concepts, could be anything. The point is, there is no right or wrong way to hack a game, everything is allowed. As long as what you're asking players to do is conceptual. So you could hack the theme of the game, the goal of the game, that way that they win, the things that they say or don't say, and so on. Using rock paper scissors as a starting point, I'll give you a set of three quick creative challenges to hack the game into different games. Make sure that you take a break in between each challenge to let your brain recharge by doing something else, not making games. Ready. Here is your first challenge, Put a five minutes timer on and jot down all the ideas to hack rock paper scissors. Try to mute that critical voice and instead just sketch or write everything that comes to mind. At this point it doesn't need to be a fully fleshed game idea because an idea is not a complete game. An idea could be rock paper scissors, but played with your feet. I don't know if that even works, but it's an idea. So the point here is to generate as many ideas as you can in five minutes. So now pause this video and start the timer. Did you take a break? Okay, here's the second challenge, another five minutes. But this time, come up with bad ideas. Think about the ways in which you could make rock paper scissors terrible, impossible, boring. Whenever an idea comes up, write it down and then think, how could I make this even worse? Then keep going for five minutes. Now pause this video and start the timer. Third challenge, another five minutes. Think about ways to make rock paper scissors playable by three or more players. So turn it into a multiplayer experience. Now, pause the video and start the timer. Now, how many ideas did you come up with in 15 minutes? I would like you to take one of them and stop thinking about how do you actually play it? So how do players make their moves? With their hands, with their voices or some other way and what do they look like? What do they sound like? How do you win around? How do you win the game? Can you even when the game? So give yourself 15 minutes to think about how you actually play this new version of rock paper scissors. Now, pause the video and start the timer. When you have a better sense of how your game works, it's time to find someone else and playtest your game. Keep in mind that it may work differently than what you have imagined. But that's okay because games are things that will keep evolving while play testing. All game designers do that. So tweak and test and tweak and tests until you're happy. Also don't worry about completely being in an idea and trying a new one. The good thing about having a lot of ideas is that you don't have to stick with one. So go ahead and playtest your hack of rock paper scissors. 4. What did you hack?: [MUSIC] Congratulations. You just made your own game. Or maybe even more than one. How did you hack Rock, Paper, Scissors? Did you replace the three elements with another three? Say three animals, three types of people, three different feelings? A common trio that comes up when I'm working with young people is student, teacher, and parent. Different hand gestures, and sometimes with different power relationships. Sometimes, the student is stronger than the parent, sometimes it's the other way around. That's a great hack. However, after you played a few rounds, you'll realize that under the skin, this is still rock, paper, scissors. But what if you were to change the rules? What if you were to introduce a different goal? Like a different way to score points. Then you would have a different game even though you kept the same element: rock, paper, and scissors. For example, a team I was working with started their hacktivity by asking what-if questions. Rock normally breaks scissors, but what if scissors were sharpened by rock? Paper wraps rock, but what if it was a gift wrap? Scissors usually cut through paper, but what if paper were blunting scissors over time? In this hack, you would play a normal round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and then flip a coin to decide whether you're using the standard or the inverted hierarchy. Another team decided to hack the goal to make Rock, Paper, Scissors a cooperative game. You close your eyes, make your move, and then open your eyes. If your choices match, then you both win. You see, by hacking games, we can start to understand their ingredients, how those ingredients work and how they affect the play experience. Let's dive into how game designers think about those game ingredients. [MUSIC] 5. Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics: Game designers like to talk about games in terms of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. In other words, we talk about how games work, how people react to them, and how they feel while playing. Let's dive into these three concepts one by one. Mechanics are the rules of the game. When you analyze the mechanics, you ask questions like, what is the setup of the game? What actions can people take? What are the consequences of those actions on the game state? How does the game end? How is resolution determined? Let's take chess as an example. What are the mechanics of chess? The board, the initial setup of pieces, the fact that you can only move one piece per turn. The way that different pieces can move, and of course, the check rule. If your king is in a position where it could be taken next turn, then you're forced to try and take it out of that position. If you cannot do that, then you lost the game. Really Bad Chess is a brilliant hack of chess, which changes only one mechanic, which is the initial combination of pieces. Everything else is the same, and yet the game plays quite differently. When the mechanics of the game are set in motion, in other words, when people start playing the game, then you can observe certain behavior, certain strategies, certain tactics emerge. Those are the dynamics. When you analyze dynamics, you're asking questions like, how do people react to the rules? How do people interact with each other? What do they tend to do in order to win or in order to achieve their goals? For example, what are the dynamics of chess? If you play classic chess, you generally start your game with pawns, and then as the board clears, you focus your attention on the more powerful pieces. There isn't a rule forcing you to do that, but you may have noticed that's a better strategy. Another dynamic of chess is that players tend to keep their king surrounded. Again, not a rule, but you may have noticed that it's not a good idea to venture out with your king as an attack piece. This hack of chess is called Play it by Trust, made by Yoko Ono. It's another brilliant hack of chess in which a small twist can make a big difference. In this case, all the pieces and the board are white. How do you think this changes the dynamics of chess? What strategies can you put in play when all the pieces are seemingly on the same team? What does it even mean to win in this context? Then there are the aesthetics. Usually, when we talk about aesthetics, we refer to the visual elements of an object. But in game design, we talk about aesthetics to refer to the experience people are having while playing. Questions you ask about aesthetics are, is this game slow and strategic or is it fast and transit? What feelings are people experiencing? For example, what are the experiences and feelings emerging from the mechanics and dynamics of chess? Well, chess is a game where there is no chance, you're not drawing cards or rolling the dice. Chess is a game where there is no hidden information, is all out there for you to see. Chess is a game of pure competition between you and your opponent. This leads to an experience that tends to be quite strategic and thoughtful and silent. Because really there is no point in talking to your opponent, it's just a pure battle between you and them. But what would happen if you turn chess into a three players game? Well, that's what Ruth Catlow did with this hack called Rethinking Wargames. In this three-player version, you have one player controlling all the pawns united the working class of the chess world, and then two other players controlling the white and the black elites, just still trying to destroy each other while the pawns are trying to stop the violence. How do you think this changes the experience of playing chess? How do you think the pawn player feels and how do you think the elite players feel instead? Well, if you have a chessboard, I would strongly encourage you to try it firsthand. The three chess hacks I showed you, really bad chess, Play it by Trust, and Rethinking Wargames are all operating at the mechanics level. They change one or two of the chess mechanics and that has a big impact on the dynamics and the aesthetics. That's really a key point about mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. The mechanics of a game will shape the dynamics, which in turn will shape the aesthetics. As a designer, you work on the mechanics. You design rules which will then shape how people respond to them, both in terms of actions, dynamics, and feelings, aesthetics. We can use this framework not just to analyze and design games, but any interactive system. Let's take Twitter as an example. What are the mechanics, the rules of Twitter? First, you need to make an account in order to post. But you can consume most of the content on Twitter without having an account. When you want to post, there is a limit to the amount of characters that you can fit. You can follow other accounts, and other accounts can follow you, and so on. These are the mechanics of Twitter. What dynamics emerge from the Twitter mechanics? In other words, how do people tend to play the Twitter game? Well, tweets have to be short, so people use abbreviations and tech-speak in order to fit within the character limit. When people follow you, they will be shown your content. The more followers, the more reach, the more people that are tuning in to your tweets. Since your followers are displayed as numbers, the bigger the number, the more status. But imagine if Twitter weren't showing those metrics, how would that change the Twitter game? What are the aesthetics of Twitter? How do you feel when using Twitter? Well, your experience of using Twitter is shaped by the dynamics of Twitter, which in turn is shaped by the mechanics of the platform. You, as a designer, whether you're designing a game or anything else that involves other humans, you cannot design directly their feelings, but you can design features and rules which will shape how they act and how they feel. Let's put the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics into practice. 6. Start by picking a boardgame!: [MUSIC] In this project, you will practice the game hacking process. First step is to pick a board game. Then second step, unpick that board game and analyze its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. Third, coming up with hack ideas and prototype them and forth, playtest with other people. Then back to Number 2 and repeat until you are happy. To start, all you need is one board game to unpick. But don't worry, you won't be physically ripping anything apart. By unpicking, I mean, playing the game critically. Asking yourself questions like, what is the idea behind this rule? What is the feeling behind this action? Why can I do this but not that? For your first project, I recommend you pick a simple and possibly abstract game. By simple, I mean a game that you can learn how to play in five minutes and by abstract, I mean a game that doesn't rely too much on a story. One that doesn't have a strong theme and so it exposes its raw mechanics. If you have one of those simple and possibly abstract games at home or one that you can borrow, then go ahead and unpick that. Otherwise, you can download one from the project resources. These are sets of traditional board games that exist in the public domain. From each of those board games, you can print the board and then find objects from either other games or small objects that you have at home. Such as beans or nuts or even small bits of paper. If the rules of the game don't make sense to you, then look up online for a video or a page that explains you how to play. [MUSIC] 7. Let’s unpick that game!: [MUSIC] Once you have chosen a game to hack, how will you going to unpick it? Well, by analyzing its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of course. I prepared a worksheet for you to download from the project resources. You can either print it out or make a copy and fill it out on your device. In the worksheet, you will find questions and prompts that will guide your analysis. I will recommend you start by listing the mechanics that make more sense to you and then observe yourself in your actions and your feelings. Also, jot down any ideas that come up for potential hacks and give yourself no more than half an hour to do this. You don't need to play the whole game or to understand all the rules. If you can play with someone else, that's great because it will give you a more authentic experience and potentially more data and in that case, make sure you ask your fellow players about their thinking process and how they felt while they're playing but you can also play and analyze on your own and if necessary, pretend to be one or more players are the ones and after you've come up with a few hack ideas, you will choose your favorite one and start turning it into a game draft aka a prototype. 8. Hacking the board game Carcassonne: [MUSIC] Sometimes the most effective way to learn how to do something is to watch someone else do it, and then as soon as you can apply that to your own project. Let me show you how I hacked a game called Carcassonne into a cooperative game. Carcassonne is a very popular board game inspired by the city of Carcassonne in France. That city is famous for its castle and walled fortress. In Carcassonne, players compete to build Carcassonne-like cities, connect them with roads, and surround them with farmland. Let's analyze the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of Carcassonne. In Carcassonne players take turns placing tiles they draw from the pile, one tile per turn. Each tile can feature a city, a road, a monastery, farmland, or more likely a combination of those. In the standard game there are 72 tiles so that means 72 turns well actually 71 because the starting tile is always the same and it doesn't count as a player turn. The core mechanism of Carcassonne is that when you place a tile, you must attach it to at least one of the tile there has already been placed so that roads connect to roads, cities connect to cities, and so on. It's similar to a jigsaw puzzle, but there are multiple ways to connect tiles, which means that you have a huge number of possible configurations. If we were to stop here, then we would have just described a turn-based jigsaw puzzle in which players build a different landscape each time. But Carcassonne is that competitive game and players compete over territory. After you place the tile, you may deploy one of your workers, also known as maples, which is a fusion of my and people on that tile to claim a new road, to claim a new city, to claim a new monastery, or to claim new farmland. Each player has a limited number of workers or maples. When you deploy a worker on a feature like a road or a city, it will stay there until that feature is complete. When the city road farmland is complete, then that worker scores points for its employee, for his player, and crucially, you will get that maple back. You can redeploy it in future turns. What are the dynamics of Carcassonne? What are people doing and thinking while they play? It turns Carcassonne are really quick because you place a tile, maybe a worker, and then your turn is over and you look at the tile and you're thinking, how could I maximize the features of this tile? Where could it yield more points for me? Then you're looking at the map, thinking about where are the best opportunities. Then you're thinking about your workers. You're thinking, should I put a worker here? How long will it stay there and doesn't have a chance to actually score points for me, or should I keep it for another tile? Then as the game progresses, you have to decide whether you want to prioritize short projects, such as a short road or a small city, which will give you less points, but also have more chances of being completed. Or whether you want to embark in long projects. Also, there's an opportunity to collaborate on projects. Let's say if you start a road from one side and another player start from another side and then you join it, as long as you have both maples on it, then you both score points. That's really nice mechanic to encourage that kind of collaboration. What are the aesthetics of Carcassonne? What does it feel like to play? Well, even though you're competing with other players to claim new features and to occupy a new territory, you're also working altogether and the expansion of the same map. There is this tension between competition and collaboration. There is no direct damage because you're not attacking the other players, but you're trying to exploit new opportunities as they come up, and occasionally, you're blocking other players. Sometimes it feels like solitary race where you're working on your own in your own corner of the map, and sometimes instead, it feels like your collaborating and competing at the same time, in the same zone. By the end of the game, you have this sense of wonder and almost satisfaction looking at what you have built together. How could we hack Carcassonne? In many ways, of course. For me, a very fun design challenge when hacking a game is to turn it into a cooperative game which means that instead of competing with the other players, you're all working together against the game itself. When hacking Carcassonne, I also had a personal project in mind because I wanted to make a game for my brother and for his now-wife as a wedding present. The project actually started as a pattern because Carcassonne contains the word carcass and both my brother and his wife are doctors. The design question became, what if you wear a team of doctors working together to revive a seemingly dead body a carcass, tile after tile. 9. The prototype – (play)test cycle: [MUSIC] Here is a common pattern. You have an idea, could be a game idea, could be something else, the next big thing. You feel really excited about it, you immediately start working on it. Then you spend weeks really crafting it, polishing it, making sure that it looks good. Then finally, you show it to other people, put it at a test and it doesn't quite work. But your friends are not going to tell you, because they can see that you've put a lot of effort into it and they don't want to hurt your feelings. Something tells you that you should go back to the drawing board, but you don't want to precisely because you spend so much time working on it. This is a very common story, many companies go down that route. Let's not do that, let's establish a principle. You must test your play thing as soon as possible. The sooner you get something in front of other people, the quicker you'll evolve your idea into something which is playable and meaningful for other people. Sounds simple. What's the catch? Playtesting as soon as possible means deciding what the nub of your game idea is, and then putting together the quickest and usually not pretty playful version of that idea which we call a prototype, and then watching other people play it. You may not feel comfortable sharing something which is still so fragile, something that still has so many question marks hanging around. What if people don't understand it? What if people don't like it? What if they don't like me? I have to admit I still feel quite nervous when I'm playtesting my games, but I learned that it's really worth it. I'm going to share some tricks to help you put that discomfort aside, and instead focus on getting people on board this process of growing that seed of an idea into a game. By following the principle of playtesting as soon as possible, not only will you get results quicker, you'll also realized that while we call it game design actually happens a lot while playtesting with other people which can be a lot of fun. Let's get prototyping. [MUSIC] 10. Let’s prototype!: Before you start hacking together your prototype, you need to gather some ingredients. You don't need to buy them, see what you can find around you. The first ingredient is paper. You'll need large sheets of paper to draw your board on, and maybe paper of different colors. If you don't have blank sheets of paper, maybe you can recycle some from old magazines or newspaper. If you can get hold of some cardboard, that could be useful too, because it's thicker. So it could be good for the board. The second ingredient are colors. This could be colored markers, or pens, or anything that allows you to draw or write on paper. Third ingredient are small objects, also known as tokens, and this could be tokens from other games or any small objects that you can find around you. Fourth ingredient is scissors to cut through paper, and the fifth ingredient is glue or tape to stitch things together. Once you have the ingredients, how do you start cooking? You can start by making the smallest hack. See if that even requires you to redraw anything or to change any of the components. It might just be a case of changing one of those invisible blocks that is rule. Then as soon as you make a change, you need to play test it. At this point, you can do that on your own, which is what we call solo play testing. When you play test, don't be afraid of making changes on the fly. Because at this point, things are evolving quite quickly and nothing is really set in stone. But don't forget to jot down some notes and start writing the rules. You can use the rules worksheet from the project resources to keep track of what rules you're actually playing by. Because otherwise, things would get pretty messy pretty quickly. After you play tested solo, ask yourself, ''Do I feel like I have something that I want to get a 100 people to try?'' Maybe not, that's okay. You can go back and repeat the prototyping, solo play testing, and rule writing steps. Few times. There is no golden rule as to how many times you should do it or how long it should take, but as a reference, I wouldn't spend more than one hour doing this. Don't make your game look good at this point, it's a waste of time. After a few cycles, you may not feel ready, but it's never too early to play test with other people. So let's do that. 11. Prototyping my Carcassonne's hack: [MUSIC]. Let me show you how I prototyped my hack of Carcassonne. Recap, I gave myself a brief to make it cooperative and to theme it around doctors stitching together a carcass or let's say a patient that is not quite in one piece. These brief has two creative constraints. The first is about mechanics to make it go up, and the second is about the theme. We'll start from the mechanics and we could ignore the theme, but you'll see that actually having a theme in mind can be really useful because it gives you a filter for any new ideas from mechanics, and also having a theme can give your game a layer of meaning that helps players learn and make sense of your game. The very first prototyping thing I did was cutting up square tiles from blank cards. I buy these cards in bulk. They're sold as teaching material for flashcards but you could use any paper or even post-its. Then on those square blank tiles, I sketched out abstract versions of the Carcassonne tiles. You may wonder, why didn't I start prototyping with the actual Carcassonne tiles? I could have. That would've been fine, but I felt destructed by the art, which is beautiful but it almost gave my brain extra work to do as I was trying to ignore the medieval landscape and instead refocus on the medical theme. I decided to obstruct those details away, but if this isn't destructing you, then it's obviously quicker to use the game itself as prototyping material. Once I had my abstract and rather minimum tiles, I played around with them for some 15-20 minutes to test the quickest hack. I removed the competition between players. I wanted to test how does it feel if the goal is simply to maximize score? Not bad. It feels creative and calming, a bit like jigsaw puzzle, but one with a lot of different potential solutions. However, there is no tension in this game because, well, you can't lose. The question became, how could you lose? At this point I realized that I probably needed new mechanics to add a threat for players. This is where having a theme can really help. Moving from medieval landscape to body, cities could be recast as organs, roads as blood vessels, land as muscle tissue. What about meeples? Well, those could represent open wounds, the places where the patient is bleeding. Hemorrhages, that could be the mechanism to make you lose points or maybe even the whole game. When this bleeding event is triggered, I'm not sure quite how, people would lose points, as many points as they have open wounds. Makes sense, right? Practically it means that we also need a mechanism for people to score points. For that, we could keep the Carcassonne standard rules, so one point for each road or blood vessel that you complete, and one point for a city or organ part that you complete. Then we need a trigger for the hemorrhage. The first idea was to trigger it at the end of each round, which means after each player had a chance to take their turn. It's like clockwork. The patient is bleeding, but you never know until you test it. Even though I had still quite a lot of questions about how the game worked, I decided to jot down some notes and then test it. I felt really good about this new hemorrhage idea because, well, you could lose the game now. Every moves has stakes, and that should make the game more tense and cooperation between players much more meaningful. 12. Let’s playtest with other humans!: [MUSIC] How are you feeling about your new game? Does it work? Truth is, you won't have a clue how your new game works until you tried it with some other people. Playtesting is core to the game design process and it can help you at all stages of that process. What does it mean for a game to work? Let's break that down. The first question that playtesting can help you answer is, does the game function or is it broken? When we hack a game, we introduced new mechanics or change existing ones so that we break inevitably the balance of the original game. But that's okay because through playtesting, we can create a new balance. You can do a lot of these functional testing on your own before you get other people involved. This is called solo playtesting and it can save you and playtesters a lot of time. Once you know that your game is not mechanically broken or not too broken, then you need to find out if people enjoy playing it. Are they having fun? What kind of fun are they having? When are they having fun? When are they not having fun? Those kinds of questions. Then you want to observe how people learn your game, how do they upload the rules into their head. What rules do make sense to them? What rules do they find confusing? What questions do they repeatedly ask you? You start with functional playtesting on your own, and then as soon as possible, you get other people involved. You teach them how to play, and then you watch them try. Eventually, you can give your prototype and the rules for a group of playtesters, and then ask them to record themselves while they're learning and playing on their own without you. That is the ultimate test, it's the game and the rules working on their own. Before we start playtesting, I want to give you a couple of tips. The first tip is to record everything or at least as much as possible. What I found works really well is putting my phone on the table and then ask permissions to record the audio of the whole session. Filming the session would be even better, but you have to be careful there because sometimes people can be put off by cameras. With audio instead, they will quickly forget that you're recording everything that they're saying. After the session, you'll have a record of all the moments of excitement, or boredom, or confusion, all the questions they asked you, all the things that they said to each other, and also any feedback that they offer to you. Recording the audio or video can help you, playtest facilitator, be more present with the players. Talk to them, observe them without worrying too much about taking notes. However, taking notes can be also very useful to record your own thoughts. I prepared a playtest worksheets that you can download from the project resources, and it has questions and prompts to guide you through that process. Another trick I learned over the years is to be light on rules. In fact, try to give you a player's roles rather than rules. Instead of telling them what they cannot do, focus on what they can do, and then let them explore the boundaries of the game system. That way, there will be more inclined to try things out unless worried about making mistakes. Which means that you will be learning more from that playtest. Whatever it is that you're playtesting, put some effort into setting the scene, and then let your playtesters get into characters and play with what you give them. The third tip is about how to handle feedback. Whether we're testing a game or anything else that is designed for humans, I observed that as soon as a problem emerges, everyone wants to talk about solutions. Your brain will start thinking about solutions and your playtesters will offer suggestions. But no matter who gives you that feedback, you should try and steer the conversation back to the experience. Try to really diagnose what the problem is and how they experienced it, and leave the solving part for later. Finally, remember, it's okay if your game is unclear or broken or if people are not having fun. By the way, we should talk about fun. Now imagine if we as a culture decided that all stories have to be communists. They have to be optimized to make you laugh. That sounds crazy. Why should games be just fun? In fact, we talked about aesthetic experiences and that can be any emotion. You could make a game about loss, a game about boredom, or any complex topic that provokes different feelings. Anger, fear, tension, camaraderie, relief. You see, games are not just about winning and losing, games are about emotions, and you are designing the mechanics that create a safe space for people to play out those emotions. So time for you to playtest and have fun. [MUSIC] 13. Playtesting my Carcassonne's hack: [MUSIC] Let me show you how I playtested my hack of Carcassonne. I invited some friends over and told them that we would playtest a new game. They're quite used to the drill, but I reminded them that this is a very early prototype. It's very likely that things are going to change and we will surface problems, problems that are of course to do with the game, not with them. Then I set the scene. I told them that there were a group of surgeons tasked to stitch together a strange patient and to keep the patient alive. The rules are fairly simple and there seems to be something quite natural or intuitive about placing tiles and making the features match. But we knew that already, that's Carcassonne. But we quickly realized that triggering a hemorrhage at the end of each round is actually problematic because it adds this accounting tasks at the end of each round, which means that you stop playing and you have to look out for little red token scattered around your operation table, which is time-consuming. Also, I realized that this wouldn't scale. Because if you play solo, you would trigger a hemorrhage after each turn. If you play with four players, you would trigger it after four turns, which is a big advantage. That could be justifiable from a theme perspective. More surgeons, better chances. But I wanted a game that is roughly balanced no matter how many players are playing. We took a short break and then I wondered, what if instead of triggering hemorrhages at regular intervals, we randomize them? I wanted to get back to testing as soon as possible. I scribbled some red drops on some tiles to represent the hemorrhage trigger. How many tiles? At first, I thought one every 5-6 could be a good initial ratio. But there's no need to overthink it. At this point, just try it and adjust it as you go. The randomized trigger felt much better for at least a couple of reasons. The first one is that you don't know what's going to happen. The second is that because now the triggers are embedded in the deck, whenever you draw a tile, there is little fear that it could be hemorrhage. That means more tension. At this point, the game is flowing and the conversations are going back to the theme. People are talking about bleeding to death, which suggests that points could be represented with blood drops. The win condition could be that if you'd get to the end of the pile, so if you've stitched all the body parts and the patient is still alive, so you still have blood points, then you all win. We're also considering organs in real life and how they could be represented in the game. For instance, the brain could give you a brainy ability like rearranging tiles. The eyes could let you see further, like drawing two tiles instead of one. We decided to test those. The brain ability seemed to be broken. We put it aside. The eyes though, we really liked that ability. How just having a choice between two tiles gave a play much more strategic depth. We wondered, what if we extend this into a general rule so that on each turn, you have a choice between two tiles. Let's test that. It turns out two tiles per turn work really well. But I noticed that when given a choice between a normal tile and a hemorrhage tile, people will choose the normal tile. Sounds obvious. Well, that's a problem because if you have obvious choices in the game, then you're not playing, you're just following the rules. How could we make the choice between a normal tile and hemorrhage tile more interesting? How could we make someone want to pick a hemorrhage tile? We needed a new rule and we call that the heart attack. If you have a hemorrhage tile, and you draw another hemorrhage tile, then you all lose immediately. That's pretty brutal. But that gives players a strong incentive to get rid of the hemorrhage tiles, so to avoid the risk of sudden death. See how that changes the dynamics of the game? When you get a hemorrhage tile, you're thinking, "Should I play this now and lose some blood or should I play safe and potentially lose the game next turn?" That is a very interesting problem to grapple with. As you've seen, the game has evolved and improved significantly through playtesting, and we've tweaked the prototype several times during that process. After that, I solo playtested a few more times to answer some balancing questions like how many points to start with. Then I reached out to a couple of friends who are illustrators and we started talking about how to skin this game, pun intended. But that's beyond the scope of this video. [MUSIC] 14. What's next? Make YOUR ideas playable!: [MUSIC] How did you play test go? Is your game finished, ready to sell? Maybe not, not yet. What's next? Start a new round of prototyping and play testing. Making games like making any directive system is all about iteration, which is a fancy way to say that you prototype and playtest and then prototype and playtest over and over and over again. But each time that you playtest and update a prototype, you will have new ideas for things to experiment with and new things to fix. Your game will evolve over time. Anyway, let's focus on what you have already achieved. Do you remember how you felt when you started this class and how does it feel now after you've hacked two games? Thank you for bringing your game ideas into the world. Make sure that you post notes or pictures or both into the project gallery because I want to see what you've made and I'll reply to everyone. Finally, I have a challenge for you. After you practiced questioning existing rules and making new rules, where else could you apply that thinking? What other games could you hack? Here's an example. Do you know who invented monopoly? It was a visionary woman called Elizabeth Magie, who wanted to teach people about the dangers of monopolies. She could have written a book or a novel about monopolies but instead, she designed a game. A playable version of the property market, which she called the Landlord's game. She gave it two sets of rules. The monopolist rules that model the current reality of the property market. Just like the monopoly game that we've all played and hated at least once. Then the prosperity rules, which instead modeled a policy that she was campaigning for and a vision for a fairer society. Games are powerful. They can let us step out of our daily lives and immerse ourselves in to different worlds with their own rules and their own roles. Unlike in the media, when we play a game, we shape the story instead of just consuming it. Games can make us think, and they can help us engage with complex questions and problem-solve in a safe space. Games can be about distant and fantasy world, but they can also be about our own world and we can make games about how we want to transform it. My final challenge for you is think about something that frustrates you, something that you want to change and ask yourself, how could I make a game about that?