Thanks again to Bartoneus for filling in for me last week. (Guess this means I need to make a comic for a Random Encounter– there’s a scary thought.) As a short rebuttal to the question he posed, I generally don’t talk about fun specifically because it’s hard to design to be fun, and it’s a very subjective measure. We have someone in our design group whose job it is to make sure that a game is fun enough to proceed in designing after it passes the simple/elegant/not-broken tests. However, there is the other factor of whether a game is compelling or not, which is like fun but different. That elaboration will have to be a column by itself.
Now that I’ve swept the fun issue under the rug, it’s time to talk about another issue: rug-sweeping. This is a brand new game design term that we coined this past weekend at the retreat. This refers to a designer specifically ignoring an issue with a game and hoping that the players will not exploit this issue. This tends to happen most in party games. Why is that? Read on…
Many party games are built around a fun activity, which then has some attempt to score it. For example, there’s a whole genre of “somebody tries to get others to guess something.” Taboo is a prime example, where one player is trying to get the others on his team to guess a word, but that player must avoid using a forbidden list of words. However, nearly every time I’ve played, there’s been disputes about being able to use a piece of a forbidden word, or if other forms of that word count, or the big question: what about words that SOUND like forbidden words, but are perfectly valid descriptors? I’m sure this issue must have come up during playtesting since it has come up in so many games I’ve seen and played. Did the rules address it? Only slightly, leaving the players to come up with the rest. Thus, the game designer(s) of Taboo rug-swept the problem. They hoped that, as many groups do, the players would come to consensus when these issues arise.
The guessing genre comes with many of these kinds of situations. Pictionary is a classic example, where there’s lots of restrictions of what you can and cannot draw, but the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable is blurry. The game Squint tried to fix that issue by having the players use preset shapes to create an object that the others are trying to guess (and allowing players to do whatever they wanted with those abstract shapes.) Our illustrious webmaster Justin found the flaw in that by moving the cards around the spell the word. It was the first time in many games that I had seen that flaw, so I can’t say it was a definite rug-sweep by the part of the designers.
The “create something not too easy and not too hard” also tends to have a lot of rules to try to judge that behavior, but often have a way to exploit it by going to an extreme too easy or too hard. The “judge picks something” genre, most classically defined by Apples to Apples, can be flawed by having open scores, so the judge is motivated not to pick the best option but the option by whoever is losing.
Why are these problems? To most casual/party game players, they’re not. However, if these kinds of flaws existed in a strategy game, the majority of players would gnash their teeth, call it broken, and your game would be finished.
Of course, you should always try to avoid rug-sweeping any problem, even minor ones in party games. Unfortunately, sometimes that’ll be your only option. Some activities, by their freeform nature, have flaws that make them unsuited to those who care about points moreso than the “spirit of the rules.”
One test that we use to determine if it can be rug-swept or not is the tournament test. If your game might be played in a serious tournament for prizes, you should try to avoid rug-sweeping at all costs. As soon as there’s something tangible on the line, you’ll find players who will play to win. I once played in an Apples to Apples tournament. The horror. One of the many experiences that led me to swear off the game forever.
Anyway, sometimes rug-sweeping is inevitable. Your playtesters will let you know how much of a problem something is, especially if you find playtesters in the target audience for your game. Use your judgment, think about where your game will be played, and remember, someday, somewhere, your game might be played for money.
Any games you enjoy that have an obvious rug-swept problem?
I’m actually kind of surprised that you mention it taking a while to figure out to spell words in Squint, considering the game’s box art shows just that with the tiles spelling out “Squint”?
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I can only imagine the lack of incentive to trade properties in Monopoly was rug-swept, otherwise there’d be a rule fixing it. I imagine most of the classic games we rip on regularly have similar issues that were ignored.
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Trivial Pursuit: there’s no real reason to move around the board at all? Especially late game, the moving aspect becomes simply painful.
I should clarify: spelling out words with the cards in Squint isn’t a problem. It’s that Justin used a single card, and moved it to trace the first letter in his word, then the second, and so on. As for Trivial Pursuit and other games, well, some designers sweep pretty big problems under the rug…
Do you supposed that those games which many call “group-dependent” suffer from some unacknowledged rug-swept problem? I don’t have an example of the top of my head, but that surely sounds like some sort of denial or collective rug-sweeping by the groups who champion these games. I’ve always read comments like “group-dependent” as “fragile” and “prone to fail without a sort of collective suspension-of-disbelief where everyone has recognized some fatal flaw and chooses to ignore it for the sake of the game.”
Excellent question. Some of those are probably rug-sweep problems and some are probably just niche games that require particular tastes. I’ve often heard “group-dependant” refer to games with lots of chaos and wacky theming, so they really are expecting the theme to carry the game. Regardless, those situations mean that the designers didn’t playtest it with enough different groups.
What’s worse: the rug-sweep or failing to playtest enough such that certain emergent properties ruin play balance? In the latter category, I just recall all the occassions where one card would horribly unbalance a CCG or game play enviornment. In my mind, these are just different root causes for the same general problem.
Well, at least in the imbalance problem, the designers can claim ignorance. 🙂 The quick solution is to make simpler games (also see my article: slacker game design.)
Actually, you used a very similar phrase in your post on April 13 (https://critical-hits.com//?p=752) which reminded designers to always assume every player is attempting to win the game.
The party game rug-sweeping issue seems highly related to that previous topic; would you agree? That is, party games tend to sit on the border between mere activities and genuine games. It’s the base activity that’s fun, NOT the playing of the game qua game. So party game rug-sweeping is perhaps admission by the designer that the game is not truly intended as a game, but as an activity.
Why then, bother with a score, as the esteemed Mr. Cooper recently asked while playtesting a party game? I think he might have answered his own question when, during the same game, he morosely fondeled his pathetic pile of score chips and bemoaned his lack of skill at the activity (whereupon I commiserated). He and I didn’t complain that we were losing the game, but instead that we were bad at it. In other words, maybe the chips (or cards or other counters) you accumulate during a party game are not so much to “score the game” as they are to “assess your activity ability”. This seems supported whenever I play Squint or Thingamajig; in my experience, people often don’t bother to count their chips at the end. Do you think this is a useful distinction?
Scattergories has a pretty good example of a ‘rug-swept’ problem as you define it. The game designers assume that people will come up with reasonable words to fit the categories and that the players, collectively, will determine which words are reasonable and which are not.
Now for some categories, this is not a problem. “U.S. State Capitals”, for instance, leaves little room for sneakery. But a category such as: “Things found in a park” leaves a bit more room for foolishness. After all, almost anything could be found in a park, at some point or another.
I remember one particular game where this category came up, and during that round the letter was O. Now no one was able to come up with anything for that category except for one person, who claimed that Oceonographers were found in parks. This, as one might expect, created an argument about whether or not Oceonographers are, or are not, found in parks.
Because there is no judge in Scattergories, and because there are quite a few categories that follow a similar open-ended format (“things found in ____”), these types of arguments and rules-issues come up all the time, and it is unreasonable to believe that the designers didn’t know about it beforehand. Therefore, one can only conclude that the designers ‘rug-swept’ the problem rather than deal with it.
Yeah, it could very well be the case that many of these party games would much better be served as merely activities, but you can’t really sell an activity to game companies. (You can, however, sell a broken game.) I have had some opposite experiences in the games that you list, and once Thingamajig was broken by us, it stopped getting play. There will always be people, even among those who only play party games, that play to win. And as long as there’s someone like that, and the game is pretending to be a game, the problem will be there.
I win. Right?
@ Original Sultan: Actually, the Scattergories rules address the issue you mention. There is a challenge rule that allows an answer to be voted on by all players (which includes the answerer in question, unless there is a tie). I wonder if this approach (patch?) or variants thereof could be applied generally to the problem? It seems already implicit in most party games already (“hoped that […] the players would come to consensus when these issues arise” as stated by The Game in the article above); should this just be stated explicitly instead? Or is that insufficient, and if so, insufficient for what?
@ The Game: So, IIUC, most of these party game problems that get rug-swept appear to stem from the conflict between the two “spirits” of party games. On the one hand, performing the activity as intended (rather than circumventing it) is in the spirit of every party game. On the other, attempting to win by any means allowed by the letter of the rules is in the spirit of all games (as per your April 13 post). Is that a fair statement of the problem, and do you have a proposed generalized solution?