Observation: There are lots of complexities that matter for real life that you could potentially include in the game, but all at the cost of making the game more complex (and therefore harder to create, balance, learn, play, and distribute).
(Some were already mentioned in others’ comments)
Hidden goals (that you can make claims about but can’t prove)
Random events
Partial information
Secret talks and secret deals, with only a subset of players privy to them
Transaction costs on creating/enforcing deals
Deals with lesser penalties for breaching them
Deals that need to be enforced by the players punishing each other, instead of being magically enforced by the game system
Deals where it’s hard to tell whether they were followed or not
...but I think I mostly recommend ignoring these until you have a simpler version working.
Sure. I want to make sure every player experiences a perfect, utterly indisputably mutually agreeable deal, at least once, to find the way, to know that it exists. That requires a simple game.
And then we can add things. I don’t think I know when and how fast to start adding convolutions. There’s a minimum rate, a steady ascent, where players understand every step, which generally feels good to players. I’m not sure whether it’s really optimal for learning.
Observation: There are lots of complexities that matter for real life that you could potentially include in the game, but all at the cost of making the game more complex (and therefore harder to create, balance, learn, play, and distribute).
(Some were already mentioned in others’ comments)
Hidden goals (that you can make claims about but can’t prove)
Random events
Partial information
Secret talks and secret deals, with only a subset of players privy to them
Transaction costs on creating/enforcing deals
Deals with lesser penalties for breaching them
Deals that need to be enforced by the players punishing each other, instead of being magically enforced by the game system
Deals where it’s hard to tell whether they were followed or not
...but I think I mostly recommend ignoring these until you have a simpler version working.
Sure. I want to make sure every player experiences a perfect, utterly indisputably mutually agreeable deal, at least once, to find the way, to know that it exists. That requires a simple game.
And then we can add things. I don’t think I know when and how fast to start adding convolutions. There’s a minimum rate, a steady ascent, where players understand every step, which generally feels good to players. I’m not sure whether it’s really optimal for learning.