{"id":810,"date":"2016-10-26T14:26:54","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T14:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/?p=810"},"modified":"2016-10-27T14:23:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T14:23:49","slug":"drawing-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mathesonmarcault.com\/index.php\/2016\/10\/26\/drawing-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawing Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paper is pretty neat: cheap, portable, foldable, strong, easy to decorate, easy to tear. You don\u2019t need to get it made specially from scratch. You don\u2019t need to teach players what it does.<\/p>\n

For New York University’s\u00a0No Quarter<\/a>, coming up at Starr Space Gallery\u00a0on 28 October, we\u2019ve made a set of games that explore paper as a medium. We\u2019re looking specifically at the interaction between gameplay, rules and drawing, trying to create games where people\u2019s responses to the rules create both a gameplay experience and a visual artefact. The games themselves are pretty different \u2013 a set of three two-player strategy games, a game of communal drawing over an evening, and a multiplayer party game \u2013 but they all come out of this area of overlap.<\/p>\n

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\"drawing-games-5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first three \u2013 NODES<\/strong>, CIRCLES<\/strong> and LINES<\/strong> \u2013 are pen-and-paper games<\/a> for two players. They\u2019re the sort of game you\u2019ve probably played with a friend on a scrap of paper in a waiting room somewhere, or during a particularly boring history lesson. Their general family includes games like Noughts and Crosses, Boxes, and Sprouts.<\/p>\n

Because these games are played by drawing in turns on a piece of paper \u2013 adding to the game board over time and responding to those additions \u2013 they create, in the course of play, a persistent visual record of the decisions the players made. This record becomes something people can look at and get a sense of how the game went.<\/p>\n

And because of this, if you look at dozens <\/em>of plays of a particular game, the range of visual artefacts on display gives you a sense of the range of potential intrinsic in the game – the different ways that people, presented with the rules, might act; the places their decisions might lead them to. In the same way that we can look at, say, a grid of twenty of Vera Molnar’s algorithmic drawings<\/a> and get a sense of the scope of her algorithms, so we can look at a grid of twenty different complete iterations of Noughts and Crosses or Sprouts\u00a0(or Nodes, Circles or Lines) and get a sense of the range of potential play. This makes the games particularly interesting to run at an event like No Quarter, where hundreds of possible players mean we can build up a lot <\/em>of different examples of play very quickly, and have dozens of complete game boards on the walls by the end of the evening.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also interested, with these three games\u00a0in particular, in the idea of the \u201csolved game\u201d \u2013 which is usually a dismissive term. A lot of pen and paper games can be solved \u2013 which is to say, there\u2019s a set of relatively straightforward tactics and techniques which, if followed, allow either a guaranteed draw or a victory for a particular player (usually the player who took the first turn).<\/p>\n

And as game designers, we tend to declare this bad<\/em> – to say that being solved, or even solvable, is a fundamental problem with a game. But this convention of good game design dismisses the genuine pleasure of solving a game, of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, of thinking through tactics and testing out your conclusions and then feeling that you understand the whole ruleset and all its possibilities; of finishing<\/em> the game, in a way. This idea of finishing is something we\u2019re comfortable with in digital games and single player games, but we tend to think it makes competitive multiplayer games like noughts and crosses intrinsically bad. And yet,\u00a0I remember the day I realised that I need never lose noughts and crosses again, and it was a pretty great day.<\/p>\n

And again, this seems like a particularly interesting area to look at\u00a0in a context like No Quarter, when we can display games throughout the night \u2013 and see whether they tend towards being solved <\/em>as the night progresses. Will more games end in a \u00a0tie towards the end of the evening, when everyone is more familiar with the games? Or will people\u00a0play recklessly as the night goes on and they get\u00a0a little tipsy? We can investigate\u00a0this communal-competitive space of figuring a game out <\/em>more clearly because of the visual artefacts that the games create.<\/p>\n

\"drawing-games-constellation\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alongside these fairly strategic games, we\u2019re also showing CONSTELLATION<\/strong>, a much more relaxed and more explicitly communal game. To play, you hunt through a big field of letters for letters in interesting shapes, and then connect those letters together as constellations against a night sky \u2013 circling each letter, drawing straight lines between them in whatever order you choose, and then labelling the constellation with a name made up of those letters.<\/p>\n

You can add a constellation or two yourself, and then come back later to see what’s happened in the mean time. By the end of the night, you get a big, dense drawing made up from everyone’s contribution.<\/p>\n

Our design focus for Constellation has been on two things:<\/p>\n