What do you do when you’re teaching a group, you know that they need to work on something, but you can’t find a game that teaches it? You make one up, of course! I’ve made up improv games in various contexts for workshops, new games that work online, games that work on radio, and my friend Jamie Drew suggested I write a blog on how I make games.
First of all, one of my biggest recent inspirations for devising games is Grant Howitt. Grant is a Table-Top Role-Playing Game designer, and he’s worked on a number of publications, such as the recent re-release of the Orwellian dystopia slapstick game, Paranoia. He’s probably most famous, however, for his ‘microgames’, particularly Honey Heist. This is a game in which you play wild bears who are criminals, and are after a big pot of honey.
Characters have two stats, ‘Bear’ and ‘Criminal’, and each stat is represented by a certain number of points each. ‘Bear’ represents the tenacity of your bear-like nature, your honey cravings, your tendency to scratch your back on trees, or the nearest equivalent, the ferocity of your roar. When the plan goes wrong, to illustrate your frustration, and your primal nature getting the better of you, you move one of your Criminal points into Bear. Your ‘Criminal’ stat indicates your efficacy at any skill that a bear shouldn’t have, such as making polite conversation, wielding a katana, driving a truck off a bridge, etc. When the plan goes well, to illustrate your intelligence and dastardly nature, you move one point from Bear, into Criminal. If your Criminal stat goes too high, you become a megalomaniac, and attempt to sabotage the team for your own gain, and if your Bear stat goes too high, you go on a primal rampage, causing chaos and destruction.
Those are the basic rules of playing a character in Honey Heist. There are also ways to reverse these stats, to ensure play can be sustained, and the rules are deliberately not comprehensive, to give players freedom to improvise and have fun with the scenario above anything else. Essentially, the genius of this game is its moving parts. If played as intended, there is no opportunity for players to get too comfortable because the landscape of the game constantly changes, often towards the worst, whether they’re succeeding or failing.
The key point: Whenever the players make a choice that activates the rules, there is an immediate ripple effect on the other parts of the system.
So, how does this relate to designing games to help a team?
To take a real-life example from my experiences teaching theatrical improv, I pondered for a long time about how to teach ‘Reincorporation’. Reincorporation is a skill in improv whereby players bring back story elements that were introduced earlier on in the show, (like character traits or plot points) and turn them into recurring structural details. EG: We find out a character has an overbearing mother in the first scene. If the mother never comes back, she was just a punchline, or maybe a fun walk-on part. If we bring back, or 'reincoporate' the overbearing mother in several scenes, she can have character development, relationships, and may become a driving force of the show, generating plot.
Reincorporation sounds very simple in principle, but in the heat of the scene, it’s remarkably easy to forget basic details established early on, like names, jobs, even the location of the scene, or whether you said you were brothers or spouses. Reincorporation creates the illusion of a fixed world with parameters and rules, both in the sense of building a believable world for the story to exist in, and in the sense of a 'recognisable' story structure (to certain audiences).
There are certain structural story elements Western audience members may recognise when they are put in front of something that they are expecting to have a story, be that a book, a Netflix show, or an improv set. These might include a Hero, a Villain, rising tension, climax, the talking dog, etc. These structural elements can’t exist as structure, however, if they are not consistently re-incorporated. Here are some questions I don’t have the answer to: If the Hero disappears after the first scene, and is never seen again, are they still the ‘Hero’ of the story? If The Hero is only in the first and last scenes of a 50 minute show, and is never mentioned in-between, are they still the Hero?
For a long time, the only thing I could think of for teaching reincorporation was to sit on the sidelines and literally tell players to bring back things they established earlier in a scene. I knew that wouldn’t be useful though, because the players wouldn’t be doing the work that matters for this skill. I might have one idea about what was important, and me simply telling the players to bring it back wouldn’t help them learn reincorporation. All it would do is teach them to look for things they thought I wanted them to reincorporate, rather than just reincorporating whatever they felt was important, using their own internal logic to join the dots, individually, as well as noticing what was important to their fellow players. I still haven’t found a perfect way to teach reincorporation that gives players the freedom to decide on what they bring back, but I created a ‘training wheels’ exercise that works very well for my group at Leeds University.
Let’s go back to the idea of ‘continually moving parts’ that I picked up from Grant Howitt’s games. In Honey Heist, the game continually has structure and tension, because when anyone succeeds or fails, they raise the stakes, because they immediately become closer to full Bear or full Criminal. Everything is a risk. I adore the improv game New Choice, because similarly, anything you say in that game is a risk. You don’t know when a throwaway line might be completely inconsequential, or if the director will jump on it, and force you to change it twelve times, each ‘new choice’ throwing you into further into an uncertain trajectory of deeper and deeper panic, until it suddenly ends, and starts over again. When played as intended, everything done or said in New Choice is a gamble, it has a potential risk for the players, and a knock on effect for the rest of the scene. it’s also why some people, very sensibly, hate playing it.
My goal was to create a game that forced the players to continually reincorporate a simple set of pre-established topics, but gave them the agency to make the connections that created those reincorporations. I abstractly imagined a scenario in which this pattern would happen, and then overlaid it onto a scenario where the pattern might feasibly appear. I decided three topics and three players would be simple enough to start with, then simulated how I thought a game might go, in my head. As an example, the simple topics are: Apples, Brains, Cola.
I imagined this: the first player talks about apples, then the second player elaborates on this, then the third player relates it to brains. Maybe all three stay on that for a while, then the first player relates it to cola. Then the second player relates cola back to apples again. And another thing, the whole time, the players are speaking as if these wild connections are totally obvious. My aim with that aspect was to help reinforce that reincorporation must be used with intention, in order for it to give structure to a show.
Having imagined this very abstract version of the game, as a functional tool, I then thought about where this game might believably present in a real social situation. This aspect is the sugar in the medicine. Having a narrative situation that contextualises the game helps players relate the unfamilliar rules to a social scenario they might already be familiar with. In board game design, this is known as ‘theming’, and is crucial to ensuring a board game can be learned quickly and intuitively by players. Think about how difficult it would be to understand Settlers of Catan, if it contained absolutely no references to feudalism, farming, bridges, wheat, etc. The first 'theming' that I thought of was very old, very dear friends with slightly faulty memories, reminiscing about the old days, and so they talk confidently, but keep circling back repeatedly to the same topics without commenting on it.
(Note: I’ve since adapted the game so that it’s not exclusively about elderly people, to avoid the game being a vehicle for ageist stereotypes. I think it could work equally well as three five year olds with limited attention spans/working memory, or, a group of awkward teenagers all trying to impress each other at a house party.)
When I tested the game out with Leeds University Improv, it was an immediate success. It was very, very funny, especially after the three topics had been established. After that point, whenever any player spoke about a topic, you were just waiting to witness the next ridiculous leap of logic to one of the other topics. Players discovered that if they just said the exact same sentence at regular intervals, throughout the more complex sections of dialogue, and simply acted as if they had no idea they were doing it, a line as banal as like “I had a bin once” brought the house down in helpless laughter, over and over again. When played as intended, every line the players spoke became either a set up or punchline or a misdirection for another punchline. In other words, everything anyone did either was a consequence of something that had previously been said, or provoked the effect of a future action. It’s a game my group still ask to play every week!
So, in summary, my method for devising games, for the theatre:
1. Decide which part of the topic can be built into the game so the players can’t avoid it, and which part you want the players to figure out for themselves.
2. In abstract terms, imagine the things you want the players to do, as a series of actions, or rules, and run possible simulations of it in your head, taking stock of when a particular move might prompt another move.
3. Once the moving parts work together and create ripple effects in a way that makes sense to you, transplant the system into a social situation, or game, that allows the abstractness to become a recognisable dynamic between a group of characters.
I realise this whole process is not particularly intuitive, and I got very lucky with ‘The Old Days’ when it worked perfectly for the first time. Generally, when I come up with a game, it takes a few tries to get it working properly, or, all my assumptions about the actions players might take are wrong, and it just dies on its arse the first time. I used to study software development, so the unpredictability of the process is no surprise to me! I’m currently developing a game where a novel writer fights with an obstructive AI through a Google Doc, and that’s been through at least 3 trials and still isn’t quite right.
Some questions for the comments section:
How do you design games?
Have you ever come up with a game completely by accident?
Have you ever tried a game that didn’t work, tweaked it, then it was suddenly fantastic?