I quite liked this post, both from the perspective of “game design” and “coordination theory/practice.”
I think some of the claims here are overstated – some commenters have pointed out other board games that meet the technical description of cohabitive, and I think there are a fair amount of games that have some cohabitive nature to them (i.e. I think kids playing on the playground, improvising various roleplaying games, often have some of this nature to it). I roll to disbelieve on “Every single board game rulebook contains the line “The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.”
But, still think it’s quite interesting and important that you can look at “cohabitive” games as a class, and notice that they seem less fleshed out than competitive games. I think this is an interesting vein of “fun” or “experience” to explore. And I agree with Mako that this is relevant to people being able to train skills, and relevant to theorists being able to crisply articulate important problems in cooperative bargaining theory.
I like that it both laid out a bunch of background theory, and explored a concrete example that Mako had put a lot of thought/effort into.
Some bits that stood out as important to me.
I think one of the things that made it difficult for new players to connect with the premise was the continuous payout scoring. There wasn’t a crisp objective, at the end of a game, the game wouldn’t unambiguously tell you whether you had done Well or Poorly, it wouldn’t tell you which player was most skilled (because everyone was essentially playing a different game (some goals may be harder to pursue than others, and some characters may be generally stronger, or may score more easily than others)) The game wouldn’t even reliably tell you whether you’d improved on your own previous score, since conditions varied so widely between sessions that a mediocre score in one scenario would be impossible in another.
That worked for me, I found a lot of the ambiguity and openendedness of multiplayer outcomes delightful and refreshing, the game didn’t tell you how to feel, you had to figure that out for yourself, as it always is in life. (But it is still all clearer than life ever is.)
But I think it’s important for learning players to be told what it is they’ll learn and how to tell they’ve learned it. That’s what a crisp, binary goal does.
A simple fix for this would be to find a particular score threshold that players will achieve with and only with practice, and tell the player “If you score this high, you’ve Succeeded (now move onto the next game module)”
And:
P1 was a bit of a sandbox of generic Peacewagers parts. I don’t know if that can work. It requires players to learn a lot of arbitrary information about random glued together characters before each round.
A game designer’s job is to find the fun and signpost it, so we should probably hand-design scenarios that’re reliably dense with our best finds.
I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players. They’re not paying enough attention to player psychology or wants, and they’re too preoccupied with their clever idea. It seems here like Mako is aware of this pitfall (passages like the ones I highlighted above showcase Mako attending to the tension between their ultimate goal and the needs of players), so I feel optimistic about this path ultimately working out. But I suspect it’d work out faster if Mako leaned more into thinking “what do players want” relative to “what do I want to teach them?”.
...
Somewhat minor note: I found the non-stardard formatting difficult to parse (I talked to Mako and they’d deliberately avoided paragraph breaks to convey that some groups of paragraphs were more tightly connected. I’d personally prefer just having more section headers or something, but, do appreciate them deliberately trying other formatting styles)
I suspect it’d work out faster if Mako leaned more into thinking “what do players want” relative to “what do I want to teach them?”.
A board game designer friend said something similar, and I would like to better get to know what draws people to play boardgames, today, I’m in the unserved audience, which both puts me in a good position to design novel stuff, but also disconnects me from what’s already there a little bit.
I’ve been concerned that if I have these conversations, in the shape of my questions I’ll end up communicating why I don’t play boardgames, which would incur the game-philosopher’s gravest sin, speaking unexpectedly painful words and ruining peoples’ fun… no. It’ll be less fun, but I can learn to approach these sorts of interviews in a descriptivist mode, non-judging, at times, perhaps even enabling :/
I roll to disbelieve on “Every single board game rulebook contains the line “The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.”
Was it not obvious that this claim was hyperbole, or do you mean that you disbelieve it even after making allowance for that?
Based on my personal experience, this is an extremely common goal in board games. Additionally, games with different conditions very rarely have “points”, so players tend to assume that any game with “points” will also have this as the goal.
It’s certainly not literally all board games, though.
I think people were interpreting the “that provides an anarchic dojo for development in applied cooperative bargaining, or negotiation” part as a descriptive corollary rather than part of the definition, but real genre definitions have to concern taste and purpose more than any formal properties of the rules of the games. If something is good for that, whatever form it takes, cohabitive game enjoyers will enjoy it. That could encompass a lot of kinds of games.
And so we get this tricky disagreement where my bar for whether something is good at teaching cooperative bargaining is naturally higher than most peoples’, because I believe I can see things just over the horizon that raise the bar a lot, so by comparison everything we have today does not seem like a suitable dojo to me.
If a person doesn’t see those things over the horizon, then they’ll disagree about what counts as good. If all you think there will ever be is the set of diplomacy and (so called :<) negotiation games we have today, then you should recognize the current best of those as good.
there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players
Parenthetically, what’re some examples of that? Most of the games I can think of that failed because the designer wasn’t serving players… I kinda doubt they’d have played the game themselves either. They weren’t making the game they wanted to play, they were making the game they wanted to make.
The examples that come to mind immediately are mostly from the Magic the Gathering design column (Mark Rosewater’s “Making Magic”) where he describes a class of designer pitfall when people design sets or cards that are “too clever”.
Still seems false to me? Like, it’s not even true in Chess, which is maybe the most archetypical competitive game in the western hemisphere. (It’s still zero sum, which I think is your primary point, but not all games are about maximizing points)
Something like it is true in chess. Winning or losing is the only thing that matters, there’s no nuance, nothing to bargain over. Cohabitive chess would be more like: Players would try to agree to declare an outcome as early as possible to minimize loss of life. Defeat would cost something, but the death of one’s servants might cost even more.
In practice I guess that would just be chess with more encouragement to try predicting match outcomes in advance, which I certainly wouldn’t mind. I think players would still want to play until they’re fairly certain of the outcomes, but betting along the way would be fun too.
Notably, I don’t think Alphazero would be any worse at this cohabitive chess than Absolute Winner chess. It’s already constantly predicting match outcomes all the way through.
I think I may have misinterpreted some of the other conversations here. Will re-read some of the threads and see if the statement still seems true, meanwhile I’m not particularly standing by it. (I think I’d still bet on there being a fair number of existing cohabitive board games, but not sure how confidently)
“I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players.”
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y’know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you’ve, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
I think if you want a game to change the world, it actually does need mass market appeal. (If he’d phrased the goal less ambitiously I’d be orienting to this differently).
That doesn’t mean catering to current mass market whims, but it does mean finding a way to connect to something that people want, even if they don’t know they want it.
(But also, this feels like a kinda uncharitable misreading of what I was actually saying. I didn’t say anything about honing in on metrics and following them off a cliff)
Curated.
I quite liked this post, both from the perspective of “game design” and “coordination theory/practice.”
I think some of the claims here are overstated – some commenters have pointed out other board games that meet the technical description of cohabitive, and I think there are a fair amount of games that have some cohabitive nature to them (i.e. I think kids playing on the playground, improvising various roleplaying games, often have some of this nature to it). I roll to disbelieve on “Every single board game rulebook contains the line “The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.”
But, still think it’s quite interesting and important that you can look at “cohabitive” games as a class, and notice that they seem less fleshed out than competitive games. I think this is an interesting vein of “fun” or “experience” to explore. And I agree with Mako that this is relevant to people being able to train skills, and relevant to theorists being able to crisply articulate important problems in cooperative bargaining theory.
I like that it both laid out a bunch of background theory, and explored a concrete example that Mako had put a lot of thought/effort into.
Some bits that stood out as important to me.
And:
I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players. They’re not paying enough attention to player psychology or wants, and they’re too preoccupied with their clever idea. It seems here like Mako is aware of this pitfall (passages like the ones I highlighted above showcase Mako attending to the tension between their ultimate goal and the needs of players), so I feel optimistic about this path ultimately working out. But I suspect it’d work out faster if Mako leaned more into thinking “what do players want” relative to “what do I want to teach them?”.
...
Somewhat minor note: I found the non-stardard formatting difficult to parse (I talked to Mako and they’d deliberately avoided paragraph breaks to convey that some groups of paragraphs were more tightly connected. I’d personally prefer just having more section headers or something, but, do appreciate them deliberately trying other formatting styles)
A board game designer friend said something similar, and I would like to better get to know what draws people to play boardgames, today, I’m in the unserved audience, which both puts me in a good position to design novel stuff, but also disconnects me from what’s already there a little bit.
I’ve been concerned that if I have these conversations, in the shape of my questions I’ll end up communicating why I don’t play boardgames, which would incur the game-philosopher’s gravest sin, speaking unexpectedly painful words and ruining peoples’ fun… no. It’ll be less fun, but I can learn to approach these sorts of interviews in a descriptivist mode, non-judging, at times, perhaps even enabling :/
Was it not obvious that this claim was hyperbole, or do you mean that you disbelieve it even after making allowance for that?
Based on my personal experience, this is an extremely common goal in board games. Additionally, games with different conditions very rarely have “points”, so players tend to assume that any game with “points” will also have this as the goal.
It’s certainly not literally all board games, though.
I think people were interpreting the “that provides an anarchic dojo for development in applied cooperative bargaining, or negotiation” part as a descriptive corollary rather than part of the definition, but real genre definitions have to concern taste and purpose more than any formal properties of the rules of the games. If something is good for that, whatever form it takes, cohabitive game enjoyers will enjoy it. That could encompass a lot of kinds of games.
And so we get this tricky disagreement where my bar for whether something is good at teaching cooperative bargaining is naturally higher than most peoples’, because I believe I can see things just over the horizon that raise the bar a lot, so by comparison everything we have today does not seem like a suitable dojo to me.
If a person doesn’t see those things over the horizon, then they’ll disagree about what counts as good. If all you think there will ever be is the set of diplomacy and (so called :<) negotiation games we have today, then you should recognize the current best of those as good.
Parenthetically, what’re some examples of that? Most of the games I can think of that failed because the designer wasn’t serving players… I kinda doubt they’d have played the game themselves either. They weren’t making the game they wanted to play, they were making the game they wanted to make.
The examples that come to mind immediately are mostly from the Magic the Gathering design column (Mark Rosewater’s “Making Magic”) where he describes a class of designer pitfall when people design sets or cards that are “too clever”.
I guess I’ll edit it to “competitive board games”, IE, every board game that isn’t explicitly cooperative, of which the claim is true.
Still seems false to me? Like, it’s not even true in Chess, which is maybe the most archetypical competitive game in the western hemisphere. (It’s still zero sum, which I think is your primary point, but not all games are about maximizing points)
Something like it is true in chess. Winning or losing is the only thing that matters, there’s no nuance, nothing to bargain over. Cohabitive chess would be more like: Players would try to agree to declare an outcome as early as possible to minimize loss of life. Defeat would cost something, but the death of one’s servants might cost even more.
In practice I guess that would just be chess with more encouragement to try predicting match outcomes in advance, which I certainly wouldn’t mind. I think players would still want to play until they’re fairly certain of the outcomes, but betting along the way would be fun too.
Notably, I don’t think Alphazero would be any worse at this cohabitive chess than Absolute Winner chess. It’s already constantly predicting match outcomes all the way through.
I agree chess is a competitive zero-sum game, I was just responding to the more specific claim, and just saying it seemed overstated.
Where? I remember someone posting some purely cooperative games, which were irrelevant.
I think I may have misinterpreted some of the other conversations here. Will re-read some of the threads and see if the statement still seems true, meanwhile I’m not particularly standing by it. (I think I’d still bet on there being a fair number of existing cohabitive board games, but not sure how confidently)
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y’know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you’ve, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
I think if you want a game to change the world, it actually does need mass market appeal. (If he’d phrased the goal less ambitiously I’d be orienting to this differently).
That doesn’t mean catering to current mass market whims, but it does mean finding a way to connect to something that people want, even if they don’t know they want it.
(But also, this feels like a kinda uncharitable misreading of what I was actually saying. I didn’t say anything about honing in on metrics and following them off a cliff)