Let's Play Our Way - Designing Flexibility into Card Game Systems - Gifford Cheung - Dissertation Defense
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In this dissertation, I explore the idea of designing "flexible game systems". A flexible game system allows players (not software designers) to decide on what rules to enforce, who enforces them, and when. I explore this in the context of digital card games and introduce two design strategies for promoting flexibility. The first strategy is "robustness". When players want to change the rules of a game, a robust system is able to resist extreme breakdowns that the new rule would provoke. The second is "versatility". A versatile system can accommodate multiple use-scenarios and can support them very well. To investigate these concepts, first, I engage in reflective design inquiry through the design and implementation of Card Board, a highly flexible digital card game system. Second, via a user study of Card Board, I analyze how players negotiate the rules of play, take ownership of the game experience, and communicate in the course of play. Through a thematic and grounded qualitative analysis, I derive rich descriptions of negotiation, play, and communication. I offer contributions that include criteria for flexibility with sub-principles of robustness and versatility, design recommendations for flexible systems, novel dimensions of design for gameplay and communications, and rich description of game play and rule-negotiation over flexible systems. A model of rule-negotiation is introduced as well as advancements in theory regarding unexpected use of software and socially-negotiated play.
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Let's Play Our Way - Designing Flexibility into Card Game Systems - Gifford Cheung - Dissertation Defense
- 1. Let’s play our way:Let’s play our way: Gifford Cheung under the supervision of David Hendry (Chair), David McDonald, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Jennifer Turns (GSR) Designing Flexibility into Card Game SystemsDesigning Flexibility into Card Game Systems
- 2. Overview 2 Introduction Literature Review Design Reflection Lab Sessions Analysis Findings & Implications Robustness Versatility Card Board Design 1 Design 2 Design Inquiry User Study
- 3. This is a mother daughter story. My Scope: Skilled and social play among established friends and family. 3 3 motivations for playing cards (Crespi, 1956) Gambling, Skill, Social
- 6. Flexibilityis My Criteria What? What rules can change? Who? Designers? Programmers? Players? When? At design-time? In-between patches? During the game? 6
- 7. Overview 7 Introduction Literature Review Design Reflection Lab Sessions Analysis Findings & Implications Robustness Versatility Card Board Design 1 Design 2 Design Inquiry User Study
- 8. Flexibilityis (From a literature review by Saleh et al., 2009) A flexible choice is one that provides more available choices in the future. Evans (1991): Designer of Card Game Software 8
- 9. Robust Able to resist extreme breakdowns that a new requirement would impose
- 10. Versatile Able to accommodate multiple use-scenarios and support them very well. Versatile 10
- 11. 11 Yahoo! Cribbage Deck of cards Versatile
- 12. Researchquestions 1) Is this feasible? a) How to design a system that is robust and versatile for gameplay? b) How to support communication when the rules are negotiable? 2) Design Tradeoffs a) Flexible vs. Yahoo! Games b) Adding versatility to a robust system? c) Versatility vs. Robustness 12
- 13. Overview 13 Introduction Literature Review Design Reflection Lab Sessions Analysis Findings & Implications Robustness Versatility Card Board Design 1 Design 2 Design Inquiry User Study
- 14. CardBoard 14
- 15. Investigating Robustness by emphasizing manual card play. “Dumb” 15 Design 1
- 16. Design 2 Investigating Versatility By extending Design 1 for the poker genre of card games. E.g., Semi-automatic functions that track the bets and evaluate hands 16
- 17. Video demo Design 1 & 2 17
- 18. “What now?” 18 Balancing versatility with robustness
- 19. Overview 19 Introduction Literature Review Design Reflection Lab Sessions Analysis Findings & Implications Robustness Versatility Card Board Design 1 Design 2 Design Inquiry User Study
- 20. User Study Goal: To observe players as they use Card Board and as they negotiate the rules of the game. Approach: Seeking Gameplay and Social Negotiation 20
- 21. 21
- 22. Group A, Design 1: Part I Texas Hold’em Part II Dealer’s Choice Part III Adapt Blindman’s Bluff Part IV – Free play with Design 2 Procedures Group B, Design 2: Part I Texas Hold’em Part II Dealer’s Choice Part III Adapt Blindman’s Bluff Part IV – Free play with Design 1 22
- 23. Overview 24 participants screened out of 77 for above-average agreeableness and emotional stability in Big 5 Personality 7 sessions 1 hour video-captured, 30 minute group interviews & individual closing surveys Analyzed qualitatively via thematic analysis & a grounded approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) 23
- 24. Gameplay Dimensions of: Gameplay Presence Attending to winning the game. Gameplay Readiness Everything that helps players attend to winning. Adversity Challenges in the environment. (e.g. a ski slope has varying levels of adversity: bunny, blue, black diamond) As informed by familiar HCI concepts of: Present-at-hand and ready-to-hand (Winograd & Flores, 1987) Flow (Csíkszentmihályi, 1991) 24
- 25. Communicative Dimensions of: Visibility Audibility Reviewability (Also: Copresence, Cotemporality, Simultaneity, Sequentiality, Revisability) As adapted from: Grounding in Communications (Clark and Brennan, 1991) 25
- 26. Ok, ok,so what happened? Playing extra rounds Laughter Unexpected Dealer’s Choices of games (Spoons) Broken Betting Bathroom breaks Messing around Michelle: Ahem. Michelle: Get yer cursor off my cards! Danny: hmmm? Lindsay: (chuckle) Danny: oh, sorry Tara: laughs Michelle: a little virtual bubble please. 26
- 27. Analysis A codebook that describes how players negotiate the rules, communicate, and play when using Card Board. Highlighting three themes: Mundaneity A model of live-tweaking Levels of Readiness 27
- 28. Rule changing isboring. Rule negotiation to facilitate Gameplay Readiness: Introducing & teaching rules New rules to keep play smooth Asking for rules, clarifications Trying to stay impartial This is great news! 28
- 29. Protocol 29 Asking for a rule in this game Asking for permission to do a game action Asking for what to do now Asking if an action is legal Bending the rules temporarily Choosing a game Confirming that a rule applies – blocking, waiting for confirmation Confirming that a rule applies – quickly, expecting a quick answer Confirming that everyone understands enough of the rules to move forward Correcting a wrong move, or undo Imperative command Instruction Reminding everyone about a rule Reviewing official or traditional rules Setting a rule Speculating about a rule (“Maybe”; “If”) Suggesting a rule Unfinished negotiation about a rule Unspoken suggestion for a rule
- 30. 30
- 31. 31 Ephemeral, in-situ On record & retrievable
- 32. Tradeoffs 32 vs. Robustness Versatility Full Automation
- 33. Yes andnatural. Games played: Texas Hold’em, Blindman’s Bluff, Five-card Stud, Spoons, Blackjack along with many variations in betting style A collection that is infeasible in the fully automatic case “If you play Facebook social games, you’re alone. You’re playing with other people, but you’re not really talking with them. There might be a chat system or something like that, but it’s not the same as sitting – and this is more similar to sitting in the same room as people.” – Session 1, Sherry (Pseudonym) 33
- 34. Automation Manual vs Automatic A concrete approach to understanding robustness and versatility Automation 34 Related work: Automation vs non-automation in board games (Pape, 2012; Wallace et al., 2012) Chores are fun. (Xu et al. 2011)
- 35. Analytic Focus Manual effort in games Having to do it yourself is followed by leadership, deeper engagement in the rules, and a sense of ownership. (Session 7 Group Interview, discussing the semi-automatic yellow chip) Anne: I guess it was fairly manual, putting the yellow chip in after your turn. I like things that are manual enough that you have to have some understanding going into it. Like, the game isn't just doing it for you. So, I appreciated that. Chris: (Session 3) you can kinda do whatever you want to 35
- 36. Analytic Focus Automation in games eliminates tedious chores, influence rule negotiation, helped teach the game. Also: risks an inversi____on _____of “readiness” in games (Anne, Session 7 Closing Survey) “Yellow Chip, shuffle, selection/collection of cards/chips, the bet tracker and community cards zone were helpful to me. They facilitate a learner playing the game without confusion/feeling overwhelmed by things to remember. Everything you need to keep track of is out on the board in writing.” 36
- 37. Analytic Focus Automation in games eliminates tedious chores, influence rule negotiation, helped teach the game. Also: risks an upset of “readiness” in games 1. Rule-Ready (understanding enough of the rules to play) 2. Gameplay Readiness (ready to focus on the game, no distractions) 3. Next-Stage Ready (having finished a turn, ready for the next turn) 37
- 38. Readytoo soon? Shortcutting rule-readiness Automation enforces legal play but can throw novice players too early into a complex game. 38
- 39. 39 Introduction Literature Review Design Reflection Lab Sessions Analysis Findings & Implications Card Board Design 1 Design 2 Design Inquiry User Study Criteria for Flexibility of Game Systems Dimensions Gameplay Communication Codebook mundaneity model “ready”
- 40. Limitations & Future work New depths: to... More dimensions of gameplay/communication Studying flexibility beyond the laboratory Other strategies of flexibility beyond manual and semi-automation New horizons: Minecraft, First-person shooters Robustness/Versatility for unexpected use in other domains for appropriation (e.g., smart homes) 40
- 41. Precedent Observation: Precedent as a form of reasoning about rules (Example 1) Bernard: Do we ante in here or do we just do a round of betting? Nathan: Let’s do ante, we were doing ante before so. Bernard: Alright. (Example 2) David: Yeah, so how many rounds do we play? Nathan: Um, I think until one person dies – er – runs out? ‘Cause that’s what we did last time right? David: Yeah. (Negotiation switches to a different topic) 41
- 42. Games are Law A kind of colloquial legalese in how players negotiate A familiar perspective from theorists: Suits’ lusory attitude (1978) , the Magic Circle Huizinga (1938) /Salen & Zimmerman (2004) 42
- 43. In closing, Game is not all Code 43
- 44. Thank you. To my committee, the iSchool rich in people, DUB’s open arms, the green cohort wherever we may be, my dissertation support group through the years, my sharp auditor (Natascha K.), to the bowling team, to the phd Happy hour my school away from school, to my thoughtful faithful church, to those who played, wrote, and laughed with me, to Cole & Bianca, to my growing family, and to my loving wife,
- 45. Researchquestions 1) Is this feasible? a) How to design a system that is robust and versatile for gameplay? b) How to support communication when the rules are negotiable? 2) Design Tradeoffs a) Flexible vs. Yahoo! Games b) Adding versatility to a robust system? c) Versatility vs. Robustness 45
- 46. Appropriation “Unexpected use” Perhaps the canonical interpretation of appropriation is that of customization and tailoring by users. Yet we felt that other interpretations, such as unexpected use of technology, or the socially constructed meanings around technology and its use that grow out of users’ practices, were equally interesting and worthy of consideration. (Dourish, Herrmann, Kellogg, & Kunau, 2005) Consider exporting my design terminology and my understanding of automation on new contexts (e.g., how automation affects the pace of life in a smart home) 46
- 47. tradeoffs Incompleteness When adding automation without letting go of robustness. (e.g. End-game situation in poker) Interaction costs Manual Extra labor Automation Draws attention to itself (e.g. Visual clutter) 47
- 48. Flexibilityis What? What rules can change? Identify richly/meagerly supported features Who? Designers? Programmers? Players? Authority in negotiation? When? At design-time? In-between patches? During the game? Where? Where is the flexibility? (e.g., at the level of all card games like Design 1 or at the level of poker games like Design 2) 48
- 49. Rule Negotiation Mentality Leadership/Initiative Messing around Pragmatism Idealism Ownership Rule-readiness Reasoning “That works” Precedent Fairness & Impartiality No big reason “That can’t work” Negative precedent Protocol Timing Scope 49 Asking for a rule in this game Asking for permission to do a game action Asking for what to do now Asking if an action is legal Bending the rules temporarily Choosing a game Confirming that a rule applies – blocking, waiting for confirmation Confirming that a rule applies – quickly, expecting a quick answer Confirming that everyone understands enough of the rules to move forward Correcting a wrong move, or undo Imperative command Instruction Reminding everyone about a rule Reviewing official or traditional rules Setting a rule Speculating about a rule (“Maybe”; “If”) Suggesting a rule Unfinished negotiation about a rule Unspoken suggestion for a rule
- 50. Gameplay Gameplay presence Game Goal State (Stage) Game Information Gameplay readiness Breakdowns (Computer misinterpretation, incorrect play, misunderstood rules, user error, waiting too long for others, hands-off!, cumbersome interface) Fixes (Major, Minor, No Fix, Social Aspect) Protection/Protection Skills Other Foci Adversity Interface Game 50
- 51. Communication Audio Identifying Speakers Asking about the Game State Declaring a game move Describing a move or action Describing my point of view Visual Gestures Reviewability Audio Game Log Game layout Trailing Animations Game move Passing the Dealer Chip Passing the Yellow Chip 51
- 52. a recipe 1. Pick a locale of flexibility 2. Decompose automatic functions into a set of general functions 3. Expose these functions to the user Caveat: You may lose some assurances of automation 52
- 53. Design-time perspective for building towards flexibility. Meagerly-supported features associated with robustness Richly-supported features associated with versatility New Words 53
- 55. Themes Mundaneity “Ready?” A model of live-tweaking 55
- 56. Audiowins In the context of having Skype Unsurprisingly audio is very well-suited for coordinating games, teaching, and negotiating rules. It is lightweight & can convey much or little. Contra game moves: Contra text: 57
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hi, my name is Gifford Cheung. Thank you for joining me as I share my dissertation work with you. This work was done under the supervision of my advisor David Hendry and my committee, David McDonald, Nicolas Ducheneaut and Jennifer Turns. It is entitled “Let’s play our way! Designing Flexibility into Card Game Systems!” PROPS: Decks of cards p[ened PROPS: video cued to 6 seconds
- I will be sharing the following steps in this dissertation. I will introduce my research goal which is to understand how to make a game system flexible, with the help of existing literature on the term flexibility, I will introduce two kinds of flexiblity which are [“robustness”/CLICK] and [“versatility”/CLICK]. These are two strategies that I wanted to develop a deep understanding of how to leverage for designing flexible systems and to understand how they affected gameplay. There are two parts to my thesis work, first, I engaged in [“design inquiry”/CLICK] where I designed and implemented a networked card game system which I named [“Card Board”/CLICK] that embodies these design principles. [“Design 1”/CLICK] emphasizes robustness and [“design 2”/CLICK], versatility. I treated the process of design as a way to discover the design challenges that exist when trying to create a real world game system that could be robust and versatile. A critical part of this inquiry is being reflective about the design process to bring difficult design decisions to the surface. The second part of my dissertation was to then [“study”/CLICK] Card Board as players played games over it. Like a regular deck of cards, players had to established the rules themselves and enforce them themselves. I analyzed how players have a different experience playing Card Board and how they negotiate the rules among themselves. In my findings, I draw on my design reflections and userstudy-analysis altogether give a compelling case for game system design that looks dramatically different than the typical commercial game systems of today. So, let us start at the beginning.
- I introduce my work by offering you a story about a mother and daughter who play Cribbage together. They have a tradition of it but because families don’t live together forever, let’s suppose the daughter moves away but wants to play a game or two for old times sake. What do you think happens when you replace this (deck of cards) with a computer? I tell this story to focus this dissertation. [CLICK] A survey of card players in the United States distinguishes among 3 motivations for card playing: gambling, showcasing skill and social reasons. My scope in this project is to focus on situations that should be somewhat familiar to everyone here. Games played with friends and family as a way to be together, showcasing skills and being social. Now, back to the question at hand, I will take a guess at your reaction when I replace mom’s weathered deck of cards with [“this”/CLICK].
- I’m going to guess that you don’t think this is going to be the same experience. It’s going to become fast-paced, impersonal. I will grant that Yahoo! Cribbage is good at what it does. The website advertises it as having more than 1 million plays so it is doing something right. Players who want to just jump into a fast-paced game with strangers but what happens when mom looks at this version of Cribbage? She is going to ask, “Where’s my game?” So, in comparing [“this”/SCREEN] against [“this”/cards], I say, the difference is that this medium includes her version and many others -- it is more flexible. OLD TEXT: , and, worse, it won’t even play the way that they like it. For one thing, Yahoo! Cribbage actually takes over for you during part of the game where you’re supposed to score by declaring out loud what you see in your cards. If you miss something… you don’t score it, that’s part of the game. On the computer, this part of the game which normally takes a minute or so, is replaced by a split-second computed calculation where there are … no mistakes, but also, players find that the computer played FOR them.
- there is no reason that flexibility cannot be built into a digital game system. Already, we all have intuitions about the term flexibility, but it lacks more formal definition that would make it useful for designing game systems.
- So, I start with the following initial [“contribution”/CLICK] I will be tagging my slides with the contributions in my work with little orange tags throughout this presentation. My criteria here is fairly simple. I asked what, who, and when. What. Given a set of rules, which system can accommodate more rules? That system is more flexible. Yahoo Cribbage can play 1 version Cribbage. A deck of cards can support many versions of Cribbage. Therefore, a deck of cards is more flexible. Who? Who can change the rules? The game designers? Expert modders? Can mom change the rules? When? When can the rules change? Months before a game is releasde? Only before a game has started? Only when you’ve pause the game and entered the settings menu? Or even during a game? [SKIP FOR TIME] This last [“category”/CLICK] drew my attention to an aspect of flexibility that is very natural with physical cards and underexplored in digital games. This is live tweaking, where the rules of the game are adjusted sometimes on the fly, without much effort or even a real change of mode by the players themselves.
- Now that I had this initial frame for flexibility. I turned to definitions of flexibility and reviews of the word that spanned across organizational sciences, engineering, and other fields.
- One useful characterization is that a *decision* can be flexible. If you decide to shop for a gift at the mall instead of an isolated boutique, your decision exhibits flexibility because you are preparing yourself to have more available choices in the future. Looking again at that time component, Evans says that there is a moment when flexibility is needed and your organization can have prepared beforehand or reacted after that moment. You can act offensively to take advantage of an opportunity or defensively to prepare against losses. If I am a [“system designer”/CLICK] you would say that my design choices are made before the need for flexibility arises. So, I have taken two words from this column to better explore flexibility. They are:
- Robustness. This is the ability resist extreme breakdowns that a new rule would impose. If I insisted on playing the game of Hearts with a five players instead of four… with a deck of cards, it is robust enough to accommodate my demand. On the other hand, Microsoft Hearts just cannot do this. I have to either give up my new rule or give up the game system. [NEXT SLIDE] One clarification, robustness describes the ability to resist breakdowns but ignores finding the best solution. For example, if you are playing around a very small table, having five players may be uncomfortable, however, the game can go on. So, I associate robustness with the term “satisficing” from the design sciences which essential means “good enough”.
- Versatility is the ability for a game system to do many different things and to do them well. A simple illustration is this [NEXT SLIDE] Not only can you play about 800 different card games with a deck of cards, but it is really well-suited to those many different games. This shows the versatility of the card deck. From the design sciences, an associated term would be “optimal”.
- A deck of cards is versatile because it is good for [“Mom-style”/CLICK] cribbage *and* it is good for [“many”/CLICK] [“other”/CLICK] styles of cribbage and [“other”/CLICK] games as well. Yahoo! Cribbage is not as versatile because it offers less options. I will note that it is very well optimized for [“Yahoo! Style Cribbage”/CLICK] on a computer, it eliminates much of the tedium of a physical deck of cards – keeping track of score, shuffling, setting up a game, and cleaning it up afterwards are much more optimal in Yahoo! Cribbage.
- With these two distinct design concepts – I asked the following questions. First, is this feasible, how can I design software that is robust and versatile and how will it play? A natural accompanying question is to ask how will people talk when they play because we are depending on a social negotiation of rules. So, I expect that they need to communicate much more heavily than in automated systems. The second set of questions is about design tradeoffs. What do you gain or lose by choosing Card Board over Yahoo! Games? What happens when you try to mix these strategies, can you build on top of each other? Lastly, what are the tradeoffs between versatility and robustness? [Break for a moment here – sip water?]
- And now, I will discuss the next phase, my design inquiry where you will get to see my software:
- Card Board lets you play cards. There are two versions of it: [Next slide] So, my choice was to study flexibility through the process of design inquiry in the act of designing a game system that is modeled after a deck of cards. Card Board is the name of the system that I designed and implemented, it is a flash-based game system that is allows networked gameplay. It takes its design from a regular card deck and its first iteration was very “manual” rather than “automatic”. I emphasize “manual” because I am going to use this as a concrete way of understanding robustness and versatility. This is a comparison that already is forefront in many people’s minds because making a direct copy of a deck of cards in digital form is not enough. The natural question for many is: how can you take advantage of the digital power of a computer and make Card Board smarter, more like Yahoo! Games, more [“automatic”/NEXT SLIDE]
- The first version investigates robustness by simulating a simple deck of cards with no rules of the game embedded in it. This version of Card Board is “dumb”, it doesn’t know an ace of spades from a five of hearts. If you want to play poker, *you* need to pay attention to the rules, the betting, and the details yourself. There is robustness in a similar way that a regular deck of cards is robust – you can own cards, move them, and flip them. That’s all you need to play a game.
- Design 2, explores versatility by adding intelligent features that support poker games. In this version, I hope to retain the robustness of Design 1, but build in unobtrusive components that understand Texas Hold’em. With these features, players will be able to automatically track and collect bets, keep track of the game turn, and evaluate how good a poker hand is. All of this while STILL keeping the freedom of the first design – players MUST be able to play what they like.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZy8fBEKoh4&t=7 To illustrate this, I will show you a video of Card Board.. Design 1 (until 1:24 ) You will see how Design 1 offers a set of simple features for manipulating cards and chips, but has no understanding of the game rules. Design 2 (SEMI-AUTOMATIC FEATURES): Now here is the beginning of Design 2. PAUSE when the “WHAT’S GOING ON” is run and explain: Let me highlight an example of how I have tried to make the game smart enough, but at the same time able to retain the robustness of the first design. I would say that this is an unusual step in the design that I think bears mentioning. It is the following message:
- “What’s going on”? This is my solution for straddling the line between the computer deciding what the rules are and the players making that decision. In Design 2, I often encountered ambiguous use-cases. For example, what happens if a player bet incorrectly. Say they bet nothing and passed the yellow chip onwards. This is easy to solve in Yahoo! Poker – you throw up a roadblock. ERROR, you cannot do that, please fix before moving on. But that decision runs in the face of the flexibility that I want to support. In Card Board, the player could have made a mistaken bet, he might have meant to fold, or who knows what. So what happens? Nothing happens, the yellow player chip continues to behave normally, but notice appears in the game log on the right hand side of the screen – recording the discrepancy and asks the players for the final interpretation.
- At this point Card Board exists as a representation of the design decisions it takes to create a robust and versatile game system. It’s time to put it in front of users and see how some of these design ideas play out in use. [sip water]
- In this User Study, I treated Card Board as my research instrument. My goal was to observe natural gameplay and, also, to set up good chances to see the social negotiation that players engage in when they needed to change the rules of the game. Maximum Variance . Thematic Analysis for Games and Communication and a Grounded Approach . Analysis WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THIS USER STUDY
- The procedures were to have players were separated by dividers and each had a networked station where I recorded their actions and their communication over Skype.
- They would play a round of Texas Hold’em to get started. Then, play Dealer’s Choice a poker game where players take turns picking a game to play. Then, I gave players an exercise. I gave them the rules of a game that was difficult to adapt to Card Board and told them to trouble shoot it. Finally, I gave them a round or two to try out the alternate version of the design. Some groups had the same experience, but with Design 2. In this way, I started with more natural game experiences and closed with a exercise to provoke rule negotiation.
- I recruited 24 participants, I screened for two personality traits that favored a productive amount of negotiation. The result was about 7 hours of recorded gameplay of multiple players screens each. 7 group interviews and closing surveys for each participant. I analyzed the data from a qualitative perspective. To understand social negotiation, I took a grounded approach which is to find theory grounded in the raw data that I was analyzing. To understand gameplay and communication, I analyzed the data thematically, drawing on two sets of dimensions that I had been relying on even when I was first conceptualizing Card Board. I will briefly review them next. [NEXT SLIDE] My analysis was qualitative for a number reasons, first this study was so exploratory that I wanted to capacity to analyze unexpected behavior, likewise, my design of Card Board as a research instrument depends on fairly abstract design ideas which don’t favor a quantitative approach. So, I d
- (As an aside, these dimensions exist as my contributions to the field of game design as design dimensions. I used them to shape my design thinking early on in the process and to evaluate the game system later as well.) Let me explain the first two dimensions only, gameplay can be divided into two aspects: presence (hand before face) and readiness (drop hand). Whatever you focus on to win the game: to score the best score, to progress forward in the game, to play the game. This fits into the first category. In the second category, readiness, is everything else you need to come naturally to you, the aspects of gameplay that you don’t want to overthink. For cards, shuffling, dealing, arranging cards in your hand are skills that you want to just have. They are necessary, but need to stay out of the way. These are what make you ready to play. If you have ever played a card game with a cheap, sticky deck of cards that distract you from the actual game, then you are encountering a breakdown that interferes with [this] gameplay readiness. These dimensions are great for understanding rule negotiation because these dimensions talk about what the point of the game is. And that is what is up for negotiation: are we playing to have fun, to see how fast we can play, to be strategic? [NEXT SLIDE] For gameplay, I took two very familiar concepts in our field of interaction design and applied them towards understanding game systems. The first is Winograd & Flores’s use of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. By their terminology you divide a task into two aspects. When hammering a nail, your attention is on task of hammering, that is what is forefront or present-at-hand. The hammer itself is in the background, as a tool, you should not be overthinking the act of hammer, otherwise, you’re going to miss the nail. That hammer exists in the background of your mind and this is to be ready-to-hand. In a game, the goal of winning the game is what is present. The skills that are required, the game pieces, the shuffling, the dealing, and arrangement of cards is the background of the central activity. This, of course, is compatible with the theory of flow, which also adds the idea that challenge is how you enjoy life. To account for challenge, I add the dimension of adversity.
- To design the communicative aspects of a game, I draw on Clark and Brennan’s theory of Grounding in Communications. They have a list of 8 communicative properties from which I will depend on three in particular for this dissertation: Visibility, Audibility, and Reviewability. Clearly, players will talk over Skpe and, I designed Card Board to show their mouse cursors on the screen. I chose to focus on Reviewability because I am interested in how players will want to recall what the rules of a game are through the reviewability of decisions that players have made about the rules.
- Ok, ok, so what HAPPENED? Well we had fun! Players played extra rounds without prompting, I transcribed a LOT of laughter, players had “aha!” moments when they found out they could play ANY game – one player joked, hey let’s play go fish! And, then you heard another player say, “wait you can play ANY game?” And so they played Spoons. Players completely messed up the bets, they forgot chips, they lost and found some, they donated money to each other, and raised bets when they had no right to do so. One player took a bathroom break, he figured that he could leave the game system and they would do fine without him (you can’t really always do that with digital card games) and they horsed around in general. All in all, Card Board felt like a deck of cards…. With plenty of data to analyze, [next slide]
- I arrive at 40+ codes which each detail an in-depth categorization of gameplay over a flexible medium. I will touch on three themes that build on these findings
- Rule changing is boring! Not that it can’t be creative and a game of showcasing your creativity, but by and large the rules that I observed were mundane. There was the everyday business of having to explain a rule after introducing it to players, players introduced rules to keep things from being to confusing (“put your cards here this will be the discard pile when you’re done. I’ll put a chip here.” Players stopped and asked for clarifications and they also made special effort to be distanced and impartial. For example, players sometimes forgot to say whether or not a Spade was higher than a Heart – forcing an careful negotiation when they had to resolve a tie unexpectedly. Last, this is great news. This means that rule changing is not a thing for few creative geniuses in the world, instead it is the work that all players engage in to make the game work.
- Let’s understand live-tweaking. I arrived at the following list of ways to negotiate the rules in a game. You might ask for a rule in a game, temporarily bend the rules, instruct others, talk hypothetical rules. I’ll give you a second to look over this list. [rest/water break] Two additional observations directed me to develop a model of rule negotiation. First is scope. Each of these statements has an impact on the game that extends into the future, some have small impact – a hypothetical speculation for example, others affect the way people play long into the future. Also, there is timing with respect to a game move. For example, the UNDO action happens righ after a game move. Confirming a rule quickly happens right before a game move. With all of these, I can offer a model of rule negotiation
- The game move in question is the dotted line in the middle. You can see at the very bottom is “UNDO” and [point] the quick confirmation happens right before a game move. The black arrow is the scope, it shows how far into the future that the game is affected by these protocols. At the top, choosing a game affects the entire game. Next, a speculation is just transitory. This illustration helps me connect negotiating protocol with its influence on the game itself and helps me sort through a mountain of conversation that happens in a game system like this. One implication that I would like to share is how this can help me redesign the [“messaging”/CLICK] system to accommodate negotiation. [NEXT SLIDE]
- For example, we might have two different types of messaging in a game system. The Game log that exists as a long lasting record that players would want to scroll through to review. And ephemeral messaging that appears on the game board. Given my model, I can recommend that messages with long lasting scope belong in the game log and messages that are closer to the game move itself, like the undo, or the quick confirmation, belong right next to the game pieces in question. This is an enjoyable design exercise especially because we are cracking open some intuitive ideas about contextual messaging and visibility and justifying it with this model.
- I will now discuss the play experience with Card Board and the tradeoffs among these principles.
- Let’s start by saying, yes, we know gameplay is feasible with Card Board after all. The participants played a collection of games that are pretty much impossible in the fully automatic case. And the players felt natural playing. One participant called it more similar to sitting the same room as people. This response is very encouraging for our mother-daughter scenario, and so, let’s ask why is it like this – what can be attributed to this experience?
- Now is a good time for me to point out that since the beginning the kinds of optimizations that I have been exploring have been the contrast between manual and automatic. This has been because this comparison has been such a natural question – it is the first question that people ask when I say that I am building completely flexible system. So, by discussing automation in the same breath as flexibility, I am joining an existing conversation about game systems design The robustness in Design 1 was possible because of the manual nature of its implementation. For, the game intelligence and optimizations in Design 2, I focused on bringing automation in to refine. Here is my concrete way to answer very abstract questions about robustness vs versatility and flexibility vs. rigidity. Let’s start with the manual aspect. [next] (there is was project that compared manual and automatic versions of a digital board game and another study that argues that manual chores in physical board games can actually be fun).
- In Design 1, no one but the players know the rules of the game. So someone has to step up and take (as the participants called it) leadership or initiative. This requires a deeper engagement in the rules… not surprisingly, that leads to a feeling of ownership.
- Automation was familiar to the players who themselves have played computer card games of all types. Almost every single group told me that I needed to implement automatic dealing. Anything that was tedious grated on their senses and jerked them out of the experience – if it seemed tedious, they thought, let’s take it out, make it faster, more automatic. Also, the automatic features, once enabled, influenced the kinds of rules that the players thought to play with. When the players say the the small and big blind features they said, “hey let’s play small and big blind”. And, novices liked parts of automation as a way to learn the game.
- Now, I’d like to talk about the pace of games and this is based on the theme of [“readiness”/CLICK] which is prevalent through multiple levels of my analysis. These all point at the idea of “are you ready to play now?” And all of them are treated with some impatience by the players because as soon as the light changes from unready to ready, the players seem eager to push forward. First, the game players need to understand enough of the rules to play the game. This is decidedly not about having a comprehensive understanding of the rulebook but about knowing just enough that “we’ll figure out the rest along the way”. Gameplay readiness is the dimension that I defined before where players want to focus on the game without distractions in how they use the interface. Next-stage ready means that players have finished whatever is required of them in this turn or stage of the game and are ready for the next stage. If you are waiting for everyone to finish betting when you’d done so long ago and getting bored, this is an example of that. In manual systems the order of readiness puts rule-readiness first because you need to understand *something* to start playing. Weirdly, automatic systems upset this check. When mom goes to check out [“Yahoo! Hold’em”/CLICK] let’s say, she no longer has to deal with rule-readiness. Look at this screenshot from Pogo Play. Everyone in this room can play poker with 3 buttons and a slider. They won’t know what their doing, but they can play. And the imperative of “go go go” still applies. [next]
- This explains why mom would feel thrown to the sharks as she is trying to figure out the game, it anticipates how the interface encourages players to play faster and offers some explain to why Mom will get pressure from other players very quickly. Just try logging on to Yahoo! Bridge without knowing how to play the game in the first place – it’s an intimidating feeling isn’t?
- 1 Criteria for Flexibility 2 Two sub-principles of flexibility: robustness and versatility 3 Card Board as a Design artifact, demonstrating novel ways of balancing automation with player’s authority 4 Two newly adapted dimensions of design for gameplay and communications 5 A codebook that enriches our understanding of these dimensions and serves as a basis to 6 Three themes that I think tell us how to design for mom and what to anticipate when she finally gets to play online with her daughter. Now, I have one more highlight right after the future work slide, so hold on for a moment…
- In the future, we can return to a lot of the choices I made in this dissertation to scope the work. I investigated versatility with one optimization: poker games, what happens when you explore even more branches and levels and how they interact? There are additional dimensions of gameplay and communication to explore. We can move beyond the laboratory to find flexibility in the wild. And, we can look at something other than automation which was my way of grappling with the question. There are new horizons, looking a flexibility for highly automatic games like halo or grand theft auto, minecraft would be equally interesting to study. And it turns out that my topic intersects with a growing body of work on the topic of appropriation of technology. So, can we take my terms for robust-ness and versatility and see how it applies in these domains? How do smart-home technologies affect the norms and rules in a house for example. Now, to close with one last highlight…
- Among the ways that players justified the rules that they set. One stood out as having unusual authority. I call it precedent and will seem familiar to you because of all our previous talk about the scope of a decision and the urgency of the “go go go” theme. In these two examples, the players are trying to make a decision: bernard wanted to choose how to bet. David asked how many rounds to play? And in both cases, the argument was, “well we were doing ante before” and “last time we played it was until there was no more money”– that’s how we did it before. Then “Alright.” and “yeah.” the discussion ends there. Meaning that that’s all the reason that these people needed to make a decision and continue playing. This leads to my implication, considering the force of this type of reasoning and the formality in the list of protocols from before, I assert that…
- Games are Law and by that I mean that there is a kind of informal legalese that you can look for in how players discuss the rules. [CLICK] This is a familiar perspective from game theorists – who recognize that there is something completely arbitrary about playing a game and following rules for rule’s sake. Then when the rules are subject to change, what rhetoric do you depend on then? Some discussions that debate the interpretation and application of a game rule and decisions that end with, “well, that’s the rule.” This may be obvious to these theorists bu many game research and designers have focused heavily on the embedding game rules in code, discussing “unexpected use” as if it should be “unexpected programmed mods”, they jump to the engineering solution very quickly – so I offer this closing corollary…
- In closing, Game is not all Code, we cannot look at a game system alone and expect a full picture of gameplay and I hope that game research and designer can see what new things can be examined or invented if we ease back a little from the automatic. Thank you.
- Nobody talks during Yahoo! Games. This can’t be the case here. So. 2b) Following the lead of semj-automation
- Naïve [CLICK] [CLICK] How much can the rules change? Given a set of potential rule-changes, how much of that set can be played within the game system? Furthermore, given a set of potential rule-changes identify which of those are richly-supported or meagerly supported (this will show the robustness and versatility of the system) Who can change the rules? Who has authority over the adoption, interpretation, and enforcement of the rules? Are players offered equal voices in these negotiations? (Account for differences in skills, personality, and other factors that influence power) When can a player change the rules? Before a game is adopted? During (e.g. live-tweaking)?
- Quotes! Quotes! Quotes! (better than pictures)
- Quotes!
- Quotes!
- Locus of Flexibility here… Hide? SKIP THIS…
- Design reflection Because as a designer, I have features that I am deciding to implement or discard. This vocabulary allows me to describe what I am doing when I am designing for robustness or versatility. For example, I may know that I can’t make it easy to support but if I offer a workaround, I can be satisfied that MOVE THIS
- Quotes!
- A deck of cards is versatile because it is good Mom-style cribbage and it is good for many other styles of cribbage and other games as well. Yahoo! Cribbage is good not as versatile because it offers less paths. I will not that it is very optimized for Yahoo! Style Cribbage, and eliminates some of the tedium of a deck of cards – keeping track of score, shuffling, setting up a game, and cleaning it up afterwards are much more optimal in Yahoo! Cribbage.
- Hide?