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alexxkayIf you read only one of these posts, this is the one I recommend. Hands-down the most interesting thing at the show.
Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)
Speaker/s: Brenda Brathwaite (Slide)
Day / Time / Location: Saturday 9:00-10:00 Room 133, North Hall
Track / Format: Game Design / Lecture
Description: Two years ago, after playing a run of games that both looked and played the same, digital game designer Brenda Brathwaite shut off her computer and consoles and began to consume dozens of non-digital games from all over the world. Soon, she returned to her native paper prototyping and eventually started work upon a series of six intentionally non-digital 'gallery games' each designed to explore a difficult topic. The result of this trek proved incredibly eye-opening and rewarding for her as a designer and culminated in the highest praise for a game she had ever received. In this lecture, Brathwaite talks about the design process of her series the Mechanic is the Message and specifically the award-winning game Train, and shares what she learned from our brothers and sisters in that other medium when she cut the cord, became incredibly inspired, and learned to love design.
Alexx: This was an incredible talk. My notes don't begin to capture the energy and passion of this speaker. If you get a chance to see her yourself, I highly recommend it.
Been a game designer for 29 yrs
I start designing by thinking about the entire world, people, places, stuff
Many of us feel a need to BUILD WITH HANDS
Big games industry is still a lot of fun but, way less personal
design -> team -> game
design becomes work
What if design was play?
Go directly from idea -> game
Do something by yourself just because you can
Played 3 FPS games in a row
"These are all the same game!"
Asked friend what had changed in the genre in the last few years: "more polygons"
completely avoided videogames for 9 months, immersed herself in board games
Met some notable photographers, whose work is often about complex, painful issues,
"How do you decide whether or not to take the picture?"
Pictures often capture pain
Could a game capture such an emotion?
EVERY other medium expresses complex difficult emotions
Her 7-year-old daughter came home from school one day:
"What did you learn in school today?"
"The Middle Passage. The boats go from England to Africa, and picked up slaves, who they brought to America to sell, but then Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and freed them."
(Brenda tries to keep appalled look off her face. This sounds like they were all on a *vacation cruise*!)
"Mom, can I play a game?"
"...yeah, let's make a game. Here's a bunch of different sized wooden pawns. I want you to make families out of them."
Daughter makes groups of pawns, big ones for parents, small ones for children, paints each group a different color to make different families.
When the paint dries, Brenda takes a 3x5 index card to be the boat. She then starts putting pawns on it, chosen at random.
"Mommy, you're breaking up the families! They have to stay together!"
"They can't, honey."
"But they *want* to! The daddy wants to go with the rest of them!"
"Honey, nobody *wants* to go on the middle passage."
Brenda invents game rules:
- It takes 10 turns to cross the ocean
- You start with 30 units of food
- Each turn, roll a 6-sided die
- That much food gets eaten
The daughter rolls high for the first few turns, and realizes...
"Mommy, we're not going to make it. What do we do?"
"Well, we can keep going and hope that we get lucky -- or we can leave some of the people in the water." (not a euphemism; kid knows what this means)
"Mommy... Did this really happen?"
"Yes, it did."
By the time dad gets home, mother and daughter are embracing while bawling their eyes out. What a great experience! I have to do this again!
Made a more polished version of this game called The New World.
Next up: The Irish Game
doing everything myself -- trying for *perfect* green
luxury of doing it RIGHT
Game about Cromwell's invasion of Ireland (history of her own ancestors)
orange blocks for English
impossible to win; try to 'lose least'
meaningful DESIGN decisions
EVERYTHING can have meaning
Was shopping for cloth to make terrain out of -- had been looking at various kinds of velvet, but settled on cheap burlap, as more resonant with her poor childhood.
Wrapped up pawns to bury under the burlap: "Ireland is green because of all the blood her warriors have shed"
pictures, grandmother's rosary, personal letters, all form part of the physical substrate of the game
Making games as individual artworks, not products
Has no interest in creating more than one copy
Why should all games necessarily be 'fun'? Is Schindler's List fun?
I decide to make 6 different games! I'm deliriously happy!
All human-on-human tragedy has a system -> therefore can be a game
Train
Game is mounted on a window frame with shattered glass
Black train cars move down railroad tracks
Options each turn:
* Roll die to load that many yellow pawns onto train
* Roll die to move down track
* Draw random event card
Rules never use word game or play
They do say something like "Each figure is worth 10,000"
If you reach the end, you draw from the 'terminus' deck -- All names of Nazi extermination camp
Implication: "you just exterminated 600,000 jews"
Steve Meretzky: What are you going to do with Train?
Brenda: Nothing.
Steve: You *have* to at least talk about it!
Scary prospect, agreed to do it once
Reporter from The Escapist lurking in the back of the room, wrote story
"accidental release of the game"
Got tons of love and awards
Also tons of hate mail -- was called insensitive, horrible, hurting games, should be punched
Train got lots of press, including Wall Street Journal
"Accidental tour"
game of the year award pales before the game receiving a "special blessing of torah" from a prominent rabbi.
humbled and reduced to tears
moved by power of medium
Typed rules on actual Nazi typewriter -- if there's room when setting up the game, this typewriter is next to the game board, and has the rules in it at the start
Much about Train is not obvious
multiple endings and beginnings -- not all of which have occurred yet (after about 100 plays)
The rules ARE the game, not the physical objects
"Derail" event card: "half of the passengers go back to starting gate; the others refuse to reboard."
Rule is *deliberately* ambiguous. What happens to other half? Dead? Forced back on anyways? Fled to Denmark?
procedural rhetoric, increasing player complicity, creating emotional involvement in the outcome
Do you just blindly follow the rules --- which are in a Nazi typewriter?
One player, on reaching the destination and finding it to be an extermination camp, took train back to the beginning to start again.
Other players horrified
"Maybe I'm just a train conductor with a living to make, trying to feed my family. It's just like Halo." (!!!)
Another deliberately ambiguous rule: "Train is over when it ends."
One person saw the board, immediately realized what the game was, and said "I don't want to play this game." Brenda replied, "You just did."
Treatment of tokens:
Pawns were deliberately made just barely too big to easily get into the train car
At start of game, people jam them in any which way. Only once the theme starts to sink in do they start to treat them more carefully.
unexpected observation about telling.
Some people get the game theme midway through, and significantly change their behavior...
but they never *tell* the other players what's going on!
Making more games
Mexican Kitchen Workers
Players have competing restaurants in southwestern US
Rules are structured so that you can't possibly outcompete without using illegal immigrant labor
Trail of Tears
In the middle of creating 50,000 red pawns
Not sure yet how she will use them, but is confident that will become clear
Board games have tons of settings and solutions; games are more diverse than we give credit for
We can do it too
Think beyond the constraints of video games
Tactile - touching every part, literally, with my hands
Just me and the player
Game mechanics are more powerful than paint for creating emotion
Totally new design challenges
I fell in love with game design all over again
Game designers are some of the best people in the world, and will support you.
Alexx: At the end of this talk, most of the audience stood up to give her a standing ovation, causing her to tear up.
ETA: Locking due to robo-spam.
Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)
Speaker/s: Brenda Brathwaite (Slide)
Day / Time / Location: Saturday 9:00-10:00 Room 133, North Hall
Track / Format: Game Design / Lecture
Description: Two years ago, after playing a run of games that both looked and played the same, digital game designer Brenda Brathwaite shut off her computer and consoles and began to consume dozens of non-digital games from all over the world. Soon, she returned to her native paper prototyping and eventually started work upon a series of six intentionally non-digital 'gallery games' each designed to explore a difficult topic. The result of this trek proved incredibly eye-opening and rewarding for her as a designer and culminated in the highest praise for a game she had ever received. In this lecture, Brathwaite talks about the design process of her series the Mechanic is the Message and specifically the award-winning game Train, and shares what she learned from our brothers and sisters in that other medium when she cut the cord, became incredibly inspired, and learned to love design.
Alexx: This was an incredible talk. My notes don't begin to capture the energy and passion of this speaker. If you get a chance to see her yourself, I highly recommend it.
Been a game designer for 29 yrs
I start designing by thinking about the entire world, people, places, stuff
Many of us feel a need to BUILD WITH HANDS
Big games industry is still a lot of fun but, way less personal
design -> team -> game
design becomes work
What if design was play?
Go directly from idea -> game
Do something by yourself just because you can
Played 3 FPS games in a row
"These are all the same game!"
Asked friend what had changed in the genre in the last few years: "more polygons"
completely avoided videogames for 9 months, immersed herself in board games
Met some notable photographers, whose work is often about complex, painful issues,
"How do you decide whether or not to take the picture?"
Pictures often capture pain
Could a game capture such an emotion?
EVERY other medium expresses complex difficult emotions
Her 7-year-old daughter came home from school one day:
"What did you learn in school today?"
"The Middle Passage. The boats go from England to Africa, and picked up slaves, who they brought to America to sell, but then Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and freed them."
(Brenda tries to keep appalled look off her face. This sounds like they were all on a *vacation cruise*!)
"Mom, can I play a game?"
"...yeah, let's make a game. Here's a bunch of different sized wooden pawns. I want you to make families out of them."
Daughter makes groups of pawns, big ones for parents, small ones for children, paints each group a different color to make different families.
When the paint dries, Brenda takes a 3x5 index card to be the boat. She then starts putting pawns on it, chosen at random.
"Mommy, you're breaking up the families! They have to stay together!"
"They can't, honey."
"But they *want* to! The daddy wants to go with the rest of them!"
"Honey, nobody *wants* to go on the middle passage."
Brenda invents game rules:
- It takes 10 turns to cross the ocean
- You start with 30 units of food
- Each turn, roll a 6-sided die
- That much food gets eaten
The daughter rolls high for the first few turns, and realizes...
"Mommy, we're not going to make it. What do we do?"
"Well, we can keep going and hope that we get lucky -- or we can leave some of the people in the water." (not a euphemism; kid knows what this means)
"Mommy... Did this really happen?"
"Yes, it did."
By the time dad gets home, mother and daughter are embracing while bawling their eyes out. What a great experience! I have to do this again!
Made a more polished version of this game called The New World.
Next up: The Irish Game
doing everything myself -- trying for *perfect* green
luxury of doing it RIGHT
Game about Cromwell's invasion of Ireland (history of her own ancestors)
orange blocks for English
impossible to win; try to 'lose least'
meaningful DESIGN decisions
EVERYTHING can have meaning
Was shopping for cloth to make terrain out of -- had been looking at various kinds of velvet, but settled on cheap burlap, as more resonant with her poor childhood.
Wrapped up pawns to bury under the burlap: "Ireland is green because of all the blood her warriors have shed"
pictures, grandmother's rosary, personal letters, all form part of the physical substrate of the game
Making games as individual artworks, not products
Has no interest in creating more than one copy
Why should all games necessarily be 'fun'? Is Schindler's List fun?
I decide to make 6 different games! I'm deliriously happy!
All human-on-human tragedy has a system -> therefore can be a game
Train
Game is mounted on a window frame with shattered glass
Black train cars move down railroad tracks
Options each turn:
* Roll die to load that many yellow pawns onto train
* Roll die to move down track
* Draw random event card
Rules never use word game or play
They do say something like "Each figure is worth 10,000"
If you reach the end, you draw from the 'terminus' deck -- All names of Nazi extermination camp
Implication: "you just exterminated 600,000 jews"
Steve Meretzky: What are you going to do with Train?
Brenda: Nothing.
Steve: You *have* to at least talk about it!
Scary prospect, agreed to do it once
Reporter from The Escapist lurking in the back of the room, wrote story
"accidental release of the game"
Got tons of love and awards
Also tons of hate mail -- was called insensitive, horrible, hurting games, should be punched
Train got lots of press, including Wall Street Journal
"Accidental tour"
game of the year award pales before the game receiving a "special blessing of torah" from a prominent rabbi.
humbled and reduced to tears
moved by power of medium
Typed rules on actual Nazi typewriter -- if there's room when setting up the game, this typewriter is next to the game board, and has the rules in it at the start
Much about Train is not obvious
multiple endings and beginnings -- not all of which have occurred yet (after about 100 plays)
The rules ARE the game, not the physical objects
"Derail" event card: "half of the passengers go back to starting gate; the others refuse to reboard."
Rule is *deliberately* ambiguous. What happens to other half? Dead? Forced back on anyways? Fled to Denmark?
procedural rhetoric, increasing player complicity, creating emotional involvement in the outcome
Do you just blindly follow the rules --- which are in a Nazi typewriter?
One player, on reaching the destination and finding it to be an extermination camp, took train back to the beginning to start again.
Other players horrified
"Maybe I'm just a train conductor with a living to make, trying to feed my family. It's just like Halo." (!!!)
Another deliberately ambiguous rule: "Train is over when it ends."
One person saw the board, immediately realized what the game was, and said "I don't want to play this game." Brenda replied, "You just did."
Treatment of tokens:
Pawns were deliberately made just barely too big to easily get into the train car
At start of game, people jam them in any which way. Only once the theme starts to sink in do they start to treat them more carefully.
unexpected observation about telling.
Some people get the game theme midway through, and significantly change their behavior...
but they never *tell* the other players what's going on!
Making more games
Mexican Kitchen Workers
Players have competing restaurants in southwestern US
Rules are structured so that you can't possibly outcompete without using illegal immigrant labor
Trail of Tears
In the middle of creating 50,000 red pawns
Not sure yet how she will use them, but is confident that will become clear
Board games have tons of settings and solutions; games are more diverse than we give credit for
We can do it too
Think beyond the constraints of video games
Tactile - touching every part, literally, with my hands
Just me and the player
Game mechanics are more powerful than paint for creating emotion
Totally new design challenges
I fell in love with game design all over again
Game designers are some of the best people in the world, and will support you.
Alexx: At the end of this talk, most of the audience stood up to give her a standing ovation, causing her to tear up.
ETA: Locking due to robo-spam.