One esoteric area of game design that I truly excel in is paper prototyping. I am the Queen of paper prototyping. It may be my extensive experience as a table-top gamer, or perhaps my deep love of arts and crafts, but I can prototype anything with just some blank paper, tape and a sharpie. Actually, maybe I’m the MacGyver of paper prototyping.
But if all our games turn out digital, why paper prototype at all? There are lots of good reasons for it:
- It’s cheap
- It’s fast
- It’s easy to iterate
- Anyone can do it (no programming required!)
- It can be a fun collaborative excercise
- It opens your creative synapses in a way that staring at a screen doesn’t
When I was at Telltale, I used paper prototyping for just about any “mini-game” type of puzzle I created. Originally, I actually prototyped most things in Photoshop with clever uses of layers. (I would turn them on and off to represent different states of the puzzle). But I found that paper prototyping had some huge advantages.
Ada Lovelace is widely recognized as the world’s first programmer. To celebrate Ada’s spirit the world wide blogging community wrote a bunch of awesome posts about women in technology that they admire. This was back on March 24th, and I’m pretty late to the party. So I’m going to make up for it by writing about not one, not two, but a talented handful of ladies — Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen and Christy Marx. The fabulous female game designers of classic Sierra On-Line.
Back in the glory days of adventure games, there were basically two companies that were the genre. LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. And like anything bipartisan, there were two respective camps of followers: LucasArts fans and Sierra fans. While the games from the two companies had a lot in common, there are certain things that Adventure Game historians can easily point to that separate them. The biggest, mechanics wise, was that in Sierra games your character could die, sometimes in very sudden and annoying ways. In LucasArts games, you never died, but your interest could die as you wander around and around trying everything possible to get through the obscurely silly puzzle solution. (To be fair, Sierra had its occasional weird and painful puzzles too). Sierra games also tended to be more likely to include mini games to mix up the gameplay, while LucasArts games stayed straight on course with pure “find thing put thing in right place talk to guy for clue” adventure gameness.
But the biggest difference between the Sierra and LucasArts styles had more to do with tone and story than with gameplay. Both companies were prone to put in silly jokes and plenty of puns. But while LucasArts games, for the most part, seemed to have been written by people with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9 - 11 year old boys, most Sierra games felt more satisfying in terms of goals, story, and theme immersion. In other words, the story wasn’t just about the jokes.
I think this is why I always gravitated towards the Sierra camp. In fact, two of my favorite games of all time were the Sierra adventure/RPGs Quest for Glory: So you want to be a hero, and its sequel: Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire. I also was a huge fan of Gabriel Knight, and there were several other games that I always wanted to play but just never got to: The Laura Bow mystery games, Quest for Camelot and Robin Hood: Quest of the Long Bow were all on Christmas lists of the past along with my Cobra Raven.
Coincidentally (or not) the above mentioned games were all designed or co-designed by women. I don’t know what the difference was between Sierra and LucasArts as companies back in those days, but Sierra employed several female game designers. LucasArts games were mostly (with apologies to former co-workers and their friends) written and designed by guys with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9-11 year old boys. Sierra also promoted its designers by putting their pictures on the back of the game boxes, and seeing those women there was very inspiring to me as a young person.
GDC was a couple of weeks ago already. Life’s been hoppin! But somehow I can’t seem to write any other posts until I acknowledge the fact that I was in fact there and talk a little about it.
I am considering running a seminar on LARPing for beginners at this year’s Dundracon. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a little while now, and since I have a little time on my hands, now seems like a good opportunity.
My thought was to first do an intro to LARPing that would run about a half hour and basically go over the LARPing FAQ: What is a LARP? Why do people do this? Are there any safety rules or guidelines? Is there any LARPing ettiquette? What do all those LARPing “gang-signs” mean?
After that, the fun part. A one hour “micro-Larp” where the newbs can try LARPing with other newbs in a safe and guided environment. I will try to have one or two extra people there to help out guiding the newbies if they feel lost or disoriented. Encourage them to ask questions like “uhm…what should I do now?”
Finally a half-hour cool down and Q&A period.
The micro-LARP is the part that I am most excited about. I’ve got a few thoughts on how that would go. I think the name of the scenario will be “Who’s got the thingie?”. The goal of all the players will revolve around the “thingie”. The thingie will need to change hands; some people will want it, some won’t, etc. Maybe some people will want parts of it.
For characters, I am thinking of providing something very simple: A simple name: “Susan”, a contact list of no more than a couple people: “You like John, you hate George”, a couple personality traits: “melancholy, melodramatic, eager to please”, and a simple goal: “get the thingie”.
Another thought that just occured to me is to do something a bit “Whose Line is it Anyway” and give the new players personality traits and then the main goal is for everyone to guess who has which traits. Or goals whatever. Each player will get “points” if other people can guess their traits.
Ooh: Yet another idea! A “parlor” room scene like from a mystery story. The GM plays the detective and interviews all the characters about the role they had in the murder. This has the advantage that it can be run in a short amount of time, and it gives a very communal type role-playing environment, but on the other hand people get to interact less one on one with each other. But maybe that’s ok for this kind of thing.
Some exciting ideas. Not sure which way I’ll go yet. Suggestions and opinions are much appreciated!
This past Monday and Tuesday I attended the Georgia Tech Living Game Worlds IV conference. I saw some great talks, chatted with some fun people, and learned lots of interesting things. And I never even changed out of my pajamas!
Read On Below!