intentionally ‘broken’ or otherwise incomplete game systems can help support a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play. From a design perspective, the key to making these kinds of broken games work is to frame them in the right way. In this view, the practice of game design becomes less about crafting systems, and more about mood setting and instilling into the players the appropriate ‘spirit.’
…What distinguishes B.U.T.T.O.N., then, is that it is actively self-effacing. The game does invite physical and subversive play, hinting to and even telling the players that the terms of the game are up for debate. Thus, it is not just that the rules are ambiguous; it is that the game signals an acute self-awareness of this ambiguity. The game makes it clear that players are consenting to something different than when agreeing to play a more traditional digital game. It is then up to the players to negotiate what, exactly, they have consented to.
Game Studies - Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now: On Self-Effacing Games and Unachievements by Douglas Wilson
This is a very interesting essay to me. It talks about the same kinds of things I was dealing with in International Espionage, and Douglas Wilson’s term for ambiguous social rules, the “unachievement” is neat. I’m also seeing a nice simultenaity with this thread on The Forge, which entails a discussion about whether silliness and anachronism is actually a necessary element or necessary possibility in true “sandbox” play (we’re talking D&D now):
my experience as the GM of the White Sandbox is that the gonzo Acid Fantasy kitchen-sink approach…is indeed a necessary part of the method of sandbox play. When a player says “I want to be 23, a robot cleric who gets his spells from worshipping the Server, a vast computer at the center of the earth”, for me to say yes to this—the aesthetic decision that anything can potentially fit into the setting—is part and parcel of me saying yes to…the sandbox method that leaving the edges of everything undefined and having robust tools for creating what’s there procedurally provides infinite scope to handle player-driven exploration.
As a player in the Glantri campaign, when I’ve been allowed to name a cleric the Boss and have him inspire his own religion, the sandbox sings for me—even though the result is essentially silly, I enjoy taking it seriously, and the fact that it runs contrary to the tone of the game is part of the point: having GM Eric provide seriousness and drama is a necessary foil for our comic relief. When other players have been told that they can’t name a character Sosexia, this to me feels like my agency and scope of action in the sandbox is limited; there aren’t rails exactly, but now there are walls on the sandbox that will keep us from ever traveling to wherever Sosexia comes from and learning about a land where that’s a normal name.
This is the same issue: the game designer/referee deciding to step back from the enforcement of certain parts of the fiction, allowing the players to decide for themselves what is “rules” and what is simply background or shared cultural knowledge—something that a game like D&D, or International Espionage equally is built on: you know what the fantasy-medieval is, you know what spies do. Although Wilson presents the unachievement in opposition to the achievement (a digitally enforced, centrally recorded coding of “good play”) or the anti-achievement (a bizarre version of an achievement that rewards uncompetetive play), I think that this moment where the rules of the sandbox’s culture are broken is its real counterpart: the player makes a decision to not seek out the unachievement of staying within the unenforced parts of the rules—maybe even doing so in an attention-grabbing way.
On a somewhat related note I’m looking right now at putting something together for a memories-of-games-themed exhibition call, from my copious visual record of D&D at the Banff Centre. I don’t know how it looks right now, we’ll see. Galleries are weird. But I’ve got lots of unachievements and anti-unachievements to choose from.
