So the other night I was lying a-bed and trying to give my eyes a break from digital screens. I got to thinking about this week’s Mechanic Monday, and about BURN. Something that had gnawed at the corners of my vision for how the game should be experienced, had been a question that wavered between replayability and variability. As I mentioned in my previous post, the game was inspired by a particular film, with a specific narrative. I could envision one great way the game could be played; but how many different ways were there? How could I give the play direction without giving it rails?
Having identified this concern, I confronted it and examined it. I asked myself: What are the choices, and how will they be enjoyable? And what are the ludological tensions - i.e. what will create stakes in the space between options?
So I re-examined the narrative. Something my teen self enjoyed about Spy Game was how Robert Redford’s character masterminded a perfect plan that anticipated every obstacle and overcame or subverted it. But then I thought of something that my WWII-buff wife says a lot: “We shouldn’t have won”. Meaning that the odds against the Allies were stacked so cataclysmically high, and so many crucial victories came down to impossibly narrow strokes of fortune and extraordinary efforts by individuals who found themselves in the right place and time to make them, that the Allied win of WWII feels like it must have happened in vanishingly few timelines in all the multiverse. And if I take that lens towards the same character in the narrative, I see a plan that worked because guesses were correct, and improvisations were made on the spot, and sacrifices were made. The film has a happy and tidy ending, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning and middle weren’t fraught for the characters within it.
The sacrifices part, especially, stuck out to me. And the sense of running out of options. So I looked at the two roles, and thought about what danger meant to each one. For the Asset/Agent, this was more straightforward; the danger was the surroundings, the threat was immediate, and the penalty was injury and eventually death. For the Handler, I realized, the danger was that the establishment would give up, the threat was somewhere between long-term and [whatever the threat to the Agent is/was], and the penalty was a decreased ability to help the Agent.
So here’s what I to try for the two roles:
Agent: Every turn is a Push Your Luck. You can use your items to heal yourself or hurt your opponents, or you can stockpile them to try and meet a number of difficult possible victory conditions. You can heal yourself now suboptimally or you can hope to survive another fight to maximize the damage healed. Try to cross the border or hunker down for extraction.
Handler: You have eyes on two game clocks - the Agent’s health, and your bureau’s investment in the Agent. You have a fair amount of action points to spend per turn at the start of the game, but never enough to guarantee the Agent’s safety. And you can borrow more against future turns, but that will hasten the point where the bureau deems the extraction unworth the risk. The tension is between spending your power to help vs conserving it to buy time.
Not your usual Mechanic Monday, is it? A bit more vague? Too vague maybe? Don’t care. It seized my brain until I got it down, and now I can move on. Plus the oven’s just heated, time to bake some bread. Til next week!
Having identified this concern, I confronted it and examined it. I asked myself: What are the choices, and how will they be enjoyable? And what are the ludological tensions - i.e. what will create stakes in the space between options?
So I re-examined the narrative. Something my teen self enjoyed about Spy Game was how Robert Redford’s character masterminded a perfect plan that anticipated every obstacle and overcame or subverted it. But then I thought of something that my WWII-buff wife says a lot: “We shouldn’t have won”. Meaning that the odds against the Allies were stacked so cataclysmically high, and so many crucial victories came down to impossibly narrow strokes of fortune and extraordinary efforts by individuals who found themselves in the right place and time to make them, that the Allied win of WWII feels like it must have happened in vanishingly few timelines in all the multiverse. And if I take that lens towards the same character in the narrative, I see a plan that worked because guesses were correct, and improvisations were made on the spot, and sacrifices were made. The film has a happy and tidy ending, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning and middle weren’t fraught for the characters within it.
The sacrifices part, especially, stuck out to me. And the sense of running out of options. So I looked at the two roles, and thought about what danger meant to each one. For the Asset/Agent, this was more straightforward; the danger was the surroundings, the threat was immediate, and the penalty was injury and eventually death. For the Handler, I realized, the danger was that the establishment would give up, the threat was somewhere between long-term and [whatever the threat to the Agent is/was], and the penalty was a decreased ability to help the Agent.
So here’s what I to try for the two roles:
Agent: Every turn is a Push Your Luck. You can use your items to heal yourself or hurt your opponents, or you can stockpile them to try and meet a number of difficult possible victory conditions. You can heal yourself now suboptimally or you can hope to survive another fight to maximize the damage healed. Try to cross the border or hunker down for extraction.
Handler: You have eyes on two game clocks - the Agent’s health, and your bureau’s investment in the Agent. You have a fair amount of action points to spend per turn at the start of the game, but never enough to guarantee the Agent’s safety. And you can borrow more against future turns, but that will hasten the point where the bureau deems the extraction unworth the risk. The tension is between spending your power to help vs conserving it to buy time.
Not your usual Mechanic Monday, is it? A bit more vague? Too vague maybe? Don’t care. It seized my brain until I got it down, and now I can move on. Plus the oven’s just heated, time to bake some bread. Til next week!
Comments
Post a Comment