Blog - The Button Game
Sunday, June 7, 2009For one of my game design class projects, I was put on a team and asked to develop a non-digital game that, using the MDA framework, would get players feeling a specific emotion.
Our team chose "paranoia", and for some reason so did most of the other teams in class.
I ended up talking to a friend and fellow SCAD game design student about this project and he said that when his friend was in the same class, they had the same project and ALSO picked the same theme of a paranoia-inducing game.
And he proceeded to tell me the same idea he had suggested to his friend for the project:
"You need to design a game that induces paranoia? That's easy. Just give everyone a button, and when your button gets pressed, you lose."
Although for the project, my team ended up developing my best board game, Rats, me and that friend ended up actually making this game too.
It became simply known as "The Button Game" and for a few days enjoyed some play testing experiments around our department.
We simply purchased a 2 four-packs of tap-lights. At the start of the game, each of the 8 players who had received one of these "buttons" were instructed to tap their lights on. If their light was tapped out, they lost.
Sadly, the lack of further rules lead to the game's failure in our actual playtest sessions. People found clever exploits all around that made the game unfair or simply out of control.
So, I'm considering reviving the button game with the following rules:
Your button must remain on the table, where it was first placed at your spot at the table.
I'm remembering from our playtests back then were that several people tried to place large protective objects over or in front of their button as shields. I'm not yet sure if this should be allowed or not, so that's something for future play tests.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:55 PM
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