GeoPolitics: the Game (working title) Brainstorm

Latest brain storm: a game, board/computer variety (worker placement???), that is based in geopolitics, but uses nation-states as background "non-player" characters. The players: non-governmental agencies, mostly w/ commercial interests, such as Disney Corp. or Siemens GmbH, but others may be non-commercial such as Medicines sans Frontier or Harvard University. Each playable group will have their own abilities and ways to score victory points. Each player has a hand of cards which is their "airport" : those influential people in organizations that have significance, if not the cohesion and global reach of those that make the list of playable NGOs, that rub shoulders with your agents.
Starting map variable. Non-Variable Map Portions include: 1) a map of Earth 2) divided into cultural and historically political and linguistic regions 3) with symbols denoting certain key words and phrases that the rules can reference 4) and numerals that denote the default ratings for when such territory is not a part of a major nation-state.
Variable Map Portions: 1) Major nation-state markers 2) that denote a) major nation-state allegiance b) cover default ratings for a non-aligned state. Marker positioning would be determined by dice rolls of 1) a ten-sided die 2) and based on a) a schedule for that specific region or zone, and b) marker state of other regions within the same zone.
Ratings for nation-states and non-aligned regions may include 1) Pliability 2) Taxes 3) Military 4) Wealth.
Players Place (workers) Agents 1) on board, when influencing a non-aligned state, or 2) on a card which represents a minister in the government of one of the major nation-states. 3) Only one agent can be on a location or minister at once, a) thus multiple players may be influencing the same major nation-state, but from different aspects of its government.  b) Offices are: i) Executive, ii) Foreign Minister, iii) Military Minister, iv) Finance Minister, and v) Interior Minister.
Government Post Abilities:
1) Executive : a) Replace a minister
2) Foreign Minister: a) Vote for United Nations proposals, b)
3) Military Minister: a) Prosecute war (results dependent on nation-state, e.g. United States places military bases, while Slavic Federation assimilates territory), b) raise or lower Military rating.
4) Finance Minister: a) Raise or lower Taxes rating
5) Interior Minister: a) Raise or lower Pliability rating, b) raise or lower Wealth rating if Taxes rating is higher.
Please, provide feedback in comments. Thank you.

We Need More Science (Fiction), part 1

Recently acquired Terra Mystica and have been celebrating it both when in front of me and not like a strong infatuation. If not familiar: it is a board game. What makes it so great is the gameplay; as for the premise, the narrative backdrop, I rewrite it in my head as the struggle of different post-human races a la John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion series.
Meanwhile, I just finished a fantasy novel, the Pilgrims,  while Christina is reading the first of Count to a Trillion and  find myself criticizing 'Pilgrims for how it isn't 'Trillion. *sigh* What is one to do? One, when one equals moi, makes...
A Science Fiction Inspired Board (Computer) Game

Culture of Knowledge: Isolation or Not

In Neal Stephenson's Anathem the backdrop of the narrative is an institution of scholar monks. This institution has many campuses around the world, each only connecting with the outside world at the same time in specific time intervals.
Imagine a community focused on learning, discovery, and general intellectual persuits separated from cultural shifts and political pressures. But to do so they would need to be self sufficient, producing their food, clothing and shelter. Material resources would need to be grown and mined on the land enclosed.
I don't know that I have ever lived in, or been a part of a focused community, one of a particular reason d'etre. College seemed very focused on being able to get a good paying job or an otherwise pleasant one. Boy Scouts was probably the closest I've experienced. Far from the Amish or other cloistered groups. Have any been self sufficient for even a year at a time?
There is a very strong movement in the opposite direction. Using the Internet to make information freely available. Making universities more accessible and less of a community. And doesn't having an Internet of searchable information make us more intelligent, more capable?
It isn't a matter of possible, humans can push themselves to do extreme things, and dropping out of society happens regularly enough to not be uncanny. But would preserving a language and living without personal possesions and transcribing books and teaching in classrooms with hands on primary sources be good for humanity?

The Dystopia of Post Modernism

In classic speculative fiction works Metropolis, A Brave New World, and 1984, which inspired THX, Logan's Run, and Vurt, an important element is that the workers, the common people, don't know they are living in a dystopia. In Metropolis the resistance is mollified by Christianity, in Brave New World its sex and drugs, and in 1984 it is safety and comfort. By being duped the people continue to maintain the order the elite wish, presumeably one the commoners may not want themselves. As a mental exercise let's ask ourselves, "are we living in a dystopia?"
First, there is not a single social order, even a single government, for the world, so let me point out I am talking about the United States, and those other countries called "the West" in so much as conditions are significantly analogous. As far as being pacified, the largest passive endeavor has been television watching which doesn't inspire viewers to even move, although it encourages the other major phantom pacifier: consumerism. It has greatly waned, only being taken up by Internet usage, which although diverse, the amount of passive and quasi-passive useage such as videos a few minutes in length to short text often within 140 characters is dominant. This quasi-passive portion is most fascinating because the feeling of interaction and agency allows the user to be social and maintain relationships, however they leave many feeling lonely as they are ranked and compete for attention.

Epic or Not

A great article on the scaling of rules and designing with gameplay in mind.

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120220

Designing for Meaning: When to Stop Laying Ground and Start Fractal

Ok, that is a hideous blog post title. I've been brainstorming all day and finally slowed down now at midnight enough to write. It would probably be nice if I would take more notes along the way. Discipline, damn it, discipline! Let me lay the case study on you before I go all conceptual.

Imagine you want to represent something with statistics. But, these statistics are going to be read by people, not machines. Ok, so we are going to work with integers on a limited scale. Check. Also, this is for a game that wishes to evoke meaning. Limit the statistics and encourage the descriptive text. Check.

How many statistics?

I don't know. I've been asking myself this question for a bit now. Made myself feel good by reading reviews of games that suck. I can imagine a list of six to nine attributes that will be numbered. Numbered so they can interact with dice and therefore help in adjudication when there is conflict. These attributes take the form of verbs, because they are actions that can have varying success. Also there are adjectives to bring in all the color, all the imagination. But what about wealth, fame, and status? I'm wondering about languages known, as well, but I think they could be covered with adjectives in a record keeping sense, like "English-speaker." Probably would only influence die rolls if it was a social situation and the difference between having the adjective "Native English-speaker" and "(non-Native) English-speaker" make a difference.

With wealth and maybe even fame it is tempting to imagine a numerical ordinal system for ranked comparison and even power balance. But in this elegant system that I'm chasing like a Platonic ideal numerical designations are only for verbs. Oh, but maybe you might want to have some kind of business or economic contest. Yes, but that would be some kind of verb, like "Deals," which would designate an aptitude and could then be rolled or challenged, not a fairly static measure of wealth or fame. You see, if characters or institutions or whatever are going to have an adjective like "wealthy" will there then be different but comparable adjectives, like "modestly incomed?" And if you do, then how is it in the economy of character creation, where there is a certain number of adjectives initially, to designate the difference between "modestly incomed" and "wealthy?" It doesn't have a rating system, the difference in the game is handled by the players' and storyteller's interpretations. But if those interpretations are going to have any credence by the participants then it shouldn't be that everyone is effectively "wealthy" because there is no non-role playing reason not to be (a more positive way of saying this is, you would be punishing those who want to role play a low social level character), or everyone effectively of the same wealth level because there is no mechanic to illustrate a difference. The rules need to elicit meaning.

Here is my yet unplay-tested solution: Status, or Status and Wealth for those settings where you can be a rich unskilled laborer or poor emperor, is designated by a single long adjective (yay for hyphens!) which may "cost" more than one adjective during character creation to balance it. So if no Status adjective is designated by the player the storyteller will bestow some appropriate adjective for Status such as "Serf" or "Cobbler." This character would have X + 1 adjectives, where "X" is the number of adjectives allowed for initial characters, where all X were spent on non-Status designating things and the extra one is the Status, which is evocative of the character concept, but equivalent of a relatively poor person of no significant status in the games imaginary society. Then the next scale up in said society's socio-economic scale would cost one adjective, where the character would have X - 1 adjectives designated for non-Status things, the "X-th" adjective being Status. The next highest in the scale would cost two adjectives, so the character would have a total of X - 1 adjectives, X - 2 for non-Status things, the "X - 1th" the Status. If Wealth is a separate statistic then there is some additional considerations on how many adjectives are available for non-Status, non-Wealth designations, but the concept is the same.

Part of what the post title is referring to is the question of how many attributes do you stop with for the base expression before allowing the rest to be expressed in the context and interactions of the game. I imagine in a well designed narrative system what happens after releasing to the permutations of creativity can be expressed graphically as a fractal. On one hand is clutter, over-complexity, and tediousness, on the other is lack of meaning.

Monopoly Revised

The Boardgame Monopoly has been around awhile, almost a century, and is quite well known, if not widely played anymore. I believe at the heart of its decline in popularity is the fact that it is an anti-social game. Not many people want to take the time to set up the board when they may be eliminated before play concludes. With judgement reserved on the joy of playing Monopoly, I suspect few would disagree that it is not fun to watch. However, there is something to its popularity, so much so that the McDonald's restaurant franchise has licensed the use of the Monopoly imagery for their occasional promotions, which makes it worthy of revision. Something to do with the social nature of the trading of properties, the presence of random threats such as landing on a highly developed property or going to jail, and the idea of improvement with a relatively short time before a return on the investment.

We want everyone to stay in the game, so there is no elimination mechanism. There isn't individual currency piles, but a central bank from which every one is indebted. There is a debt limit which is equal for all players initially, then it increases as properties and improvements are acquired. There is no board, properties are randomly revealed when a player wishes to go to auction. When an auction is triggered the flow of play is interrupted until the property purchased or all players decline to bid. Bidding starts at half the properties unimproved value, bids can be raised by a minimum of one monetary unit and a maximum of fifty and goes around the players to the right (i.e. the opposite of turns). When a player expends funds cash goes from the bank to the player, signifying debt. Player income is represented by cash going back to the bank. Debt greater than current debt capacity sends the player to jail. Being in jail doesn't stop income nor random effects, but does prevent participating in auctions and improving investments. Random effects, think of the Community Chest and Chance cards, are checked for on each turn and happen on a sum of 9 or greater of two six-sided dice. Most of these will be additional costs, such as property tax, zoning infraction fine, building maintenance, et cetera, of course the iconic Get Out of Jail Free, and Go To Jail. Also, effects that modify other parts of the game, such as changing the cost of making improvements or changing the requirements to make improvements would be relevant and much needed spice to the rather dry fines that constitute most random cards in the traditional game. Checking for income happens automatically at the beginning of a turn by a six-sided die roll for each property. Each property will have a rating, modified by improvements, which is a number between 0 and 6 which shows what has to be gotten on a die roll, or lower, to garner income. A rating of 0 will not garner any, a rating of 6 will always garner. Additionally, there will be a corresponding income value which is also modified by improvements and is the amount the player's debt is reduced.

The game ends when the bank is void of all cash. Points are based on positive relationship with the value of assets and an inverse relationship with the amount of debt. Being in jail at the end penalizes points.

© Michael Mosher 2012