Uno (House Rules)

photo online at http://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/images/stories/2008/11/picture-114.png

Uno is big in our house. My husband says he lettered in it in high school… I can’t verify that, but I believe it given the passion he puts into the game.

Here’s the thing: Uno is not a bad game… it’s fine as card games go. You get 7 cards in your hand, and your goal is to get rid of your hand, discarding any card that will play when it is your turn. If there is a yellow 7 card in the discard pile, you can play any yellow card, or any 7 card. You can mix it up by playing a ‘skip’ card to skip a player, ‘reverse’ to send play in the opposite direction, and a ‘draw two’ or ‘draw four’ card… even the wild to change the color to one of your choosing. If you don’t say “Uno” when you are down to one card, you have to draw two penalty cards. If you play with my husband, he will catch you on this rule. Every. Time.

When playing with the normal set of rules, Uno is easily playable in small or larger tables, and with kids and adults, which is nice.

BUT it can be so much better!

Enact House Rules Uno, and you’ve got yourself a different game! There are a lot of different ways you can vary your Uno game, but doing so teaches us important lessons about design. Why is House Rules Uno different?

First, here are the rules we play by:

• all standard rules apply, plus:
  • jump: when you have the exact card another players discards, you can yell “Jump!” and put your card on top. Play continues as if you were the only one to play.
  • swap on 7: when you play any 7, you can trade hands with any other player (probably someone with fewer cards than you).
  • table swap on 0: when anyone plays a 0, everyone rotates hands, trading in the direction of play.
  • cumulative draws: this is the trickiest. When someone plays a “draw 2” or “draw 4” card on you, you can then play any other non-standard card. You can put another “draw 2” (any color) on top, and then the person after you draws 4! If they play a “reverse”, it comes to you to draw 4, if you put a “draw 4” card on top, it is the draw 8 to the next person. The only way to kill it is to play the “wild” card.

So… how does this improve the game? First… it’s much more fun… it’s active, it’s loud, it’s unexpected. House rules:

• Increase sense of control: when you have the ability to jump at any point, you have to be alert throughout the game. You have an idea that at any point, you may have the chance to jump in. This gives you a greater sense of control because you aren’t just given a single choice when it is your turn. Your skill plays a bigger part with the complexity of the game: “Do I play the ‘draw 2’ card now, or hold onto it in case someone plays it on me?” Complexity is a lovely way to give a player more control, and a greater sense that their skill matters in the game.
• Increase randomness: it seems counter-intuitive that a game can increase both control and randomness, but control comes when you feel best able to deal with random events. With house rules, you face additional risks — another can trade hands with you, you may be on the losing end of “draw 12 cards”. These risks increase the perceived value of winning, the perceived value of skill, the perceived value of “I can beat this”… all of which makes it more fun.
• Improve balance and flow: sure… you can get stuck with 8 extra cards as the result of cumulative draws… but then you are well prepared to jump, having increased the chances you have a card in your hand which someone else could play. You can also trade your hand. With the traditional game, you sort of just go around the circle until someone gets down to one card… and then chance are pretty good that that person wins. With house rules, the balance switches frequently. Each round lasts longer, but the tension between “I’m about to win” and “I can’t believe I have so many cards” is just about right for most players.

I sometimes get frustrated at expansion packs for games — isn’t the game I bought good enough? But expanded rules are a great way to improve a game, and change it for seasoned players. In digital games, we can create newer levels with expanded complexity: with board and card games, expansions help grow the game. Mattel has offered many different versions of the traditional game, but I’ve yet to play one of these that improves it in the ways these simple house rules do.

Bang! The Dice Game aka “Everyone Shoot at Mommy”

The developer’s site (http://www.dvgiochi.com/giochi/) is in Italian. For a great description of game play in English, check out this review over at boardgaming.com.  I’m a huge fan of Bang!, the card game (and several expansion packs) which I will write up another time. Continuing on my recent trend of analyzing dice games, we’ll start with Bang! the Dice Game. I realize this is backwards, as it came after the fantastic card game, but it’s also simpler, and easier to digest. Basically, each player gets a certain number of lives, based on which character they play (probably 7-10). On their turn, each gets to roll 5 dice. The dice have the “1” range, and the “2” range, which allow the player to shoot others at a range of 1 or 2 people away from them, basically the person sitting next to them, or the person sitting next to that person. The dice also includes beer (drink one to regain a life), gatling gun (get three of these and you can shoot everyone at the table), dynamite (roll three and your turn ends immediately) and arrows (take an arrow from the pile of small cardboard arrows on the table. As soon as someone takes the last arrow, everyone loses a life for each arrow they have accumulated. Each player can reroll a few times, and then ‘spend’ the dice in their final role as they shoot, drink and get hit by arrows. Who do you shoot? Well it depends. In addition to getting a character and that character’s special powers (one character allows you to drink a beer for free at the start of every turn; another makes is so that when someone shoots you, that person has to take an arrow), you are also given a role which determines your goal. The Sheriff wants to kill any outlaws or renegades. The Vice-Deputy wants to keep the Sheriff alive. The Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff. The Renegade wants to be the last man standing. Everyone at the table knows who the Sheriff is, but the other roles are kept secret. Of course, if you play at our house, I’ll just tell you now, I am always the Sheriff. I don’t know why, it’s done by a random card draw, but I’m always the Sheriff, which means most of the other players want me dead, and the often get their wish. But, that’s beside the point.  What is important here is why the game is fun.

• Number of players: You can play with just 3 players, and we often play with 4, but I think the balance of the game really needs at least 5 to be fun. If you only have a few, the game is over too quickly, and players don’t feel that they actually made an impact by their choices. Especially when you are the Sheriff and everyone is shooting at you, you usually only last about 3 rounds with just 3 or 4 players. Having said that, if the game required 5 players, we’d hardly ever play it. I think this happens in multiplayer games. It’s easy to overlook the optimal number of players, but it’s important to think about. Similarly, when you have a game or educational intervention that will be used in a class, such as a one-computer/class environment, having a game that is played with 4 people making decisions is significantly different than one that is played with 20 people making the decisions. The number of players is as important as the anticipated length of the game, or other factors about the environment in which it is played.
• Beautiful cards in Italian, with great packaging: I talk a lot about production values, and good graphics are the baseline. Let’s talk about Italian, though. I don’t know that every game in the world needs to be designed in two languages — that’s not the take-a-way here. What is important is that, as a player, I feel I get a little something extra here. It’s fun to read the language on the card, noting that I am the Sceriffo. I feel like I’m in a bit of a secret club, playing something that normal people may not have access to. (Which couldn’t be further from the truth, just look for the game on Amazon or any major game outlet). This small detail may have originated in adding English to the game so that players outside the developer’s home country could enjoy the game, but it speaks to the power of a little something extra in the game. To me, the Italian language is superfluous, but I like having the extra something that isn’t crucial. It’s hard to know in game design when to remove everything that is not necessary, but this detail is a vote for leaving something in. 
• Clear feedback: We know the importance of this in game design, but it’s really clearly pointed out in this game. How many arrows do you have? How many are left until we all lose a life to them? How many lives does the renegade have left? By designing their icons simply, and making them easy to understand, playing is cleaner: each player doesn’t have to work so hard to collect the information they need to develop a strategy.
• Balance: If I ever write a book about gameplay, it will be called “Clear Feedback and Balance”, as that is more than half the value of any good game. (That’s actually not true… I am writing a book, and that is SO not the title!) The balance on this game varies a bit with the number of players, but generally, each player feels like they got a fair shake. That’s important, especially since each character brings a special set of skills. If you feel at the beginning of the game as though the player left to you gets an unfair advantage, that colors the entire experience. Different but equal is crucial.
• Mix it up: By offering different characters and different roles, the game feels different each time you play. It’s the same idea of having multiple achievements to bring the player back beyond simply trying to win the game. It’s a very easy way to enhance replay ability.

In some ways, this dice-inated version feels like a rip off of the superior card game: but it does succeed in making a quicker version of the game, with easier entry for different players. We can play this with our 6  year old, where the card game is a bit too much for him. The flip side of simplicity is depth: and we lose some of that in this game. It doesn’t keep us from playing it a lot, though!

Escape the Curse of the Temple

Yep, lately I’m enjoying the dice-based games. As in Zombie Dice, Escape the Curse of the Temple gives you the chance to roll a set of dice… but this time, it’s against the clock, and everyone at the table is rolling their dice at the same time, so that everyone can get out of the temple together. If everyone doesn’t get out, you all lose.

Everyone’s player starts in the center square, and must roll the right 2-dice combination  to get onto the next square (as printed on that square)… say, a blue key and a red flame. Whenever someone rolls two green walking dudes, they can add a new square to the board. Some boards have special treasures you can roll for, some have curses you can roll to get out of. As the team puts new squares on the board, the group will eventually reveal the exit…. and everyone has to make haste to get to the exit. Along the way, you roll to get the green gems (little plastic green gems… my kids love them, and I love the fact they aren’t cardboard pictures of green gems). The catch? (Other than the sheer probability of everyone rolling the right dice at the right time), you only have 10 minutes. Download the song and you’ll hear a soundtrack throughout the game, with rousing jungle drums. At 2 key points, everyone has to get back to the center square… if you don’t make it back, you lose one of your dice. Also, you can ‘lock’ your dice if you roll one of black curses on your dice… but you can unlock them if you get a gold icon.

I’m making this sound more confusing than it is.

What I like about Escape the Curse of the Temple is:

Soundtrack as a timer: It’s easy to forget how tremendously important sound is to building tension and release in a game. Even in such a short experience, the sound in this game makes it raucous, exciting, and fulfilling. If that were the only benefit to this game, I’d encourage game developers to play it just to feel the difference of a simple game with and without a soundtrack. Fortunately, it has other benefits.

Easy entry: I was introduced to the game by someone who already knew how to play it, so I don’t know how easy it is to learn when you have to read the instructions, but it is super easy to teach someone. This game is the perfect example of “Let’s play together and you’ll get the hang quickly.” Similarly, it’s easy to commit to learning this new game because you know it can’t last more than 10 minutes!

Expandable challenges: With the expansion packs, you can do a great many cool things to make the journey harder, more interesting and more challenging. Even without it, you can play an ‘easy mode’ or a harder mode. This flexibility is perfect for families with players of different ages or gaming abilities. The expansion pack is the board game equivalent of the ‘additional achievements’ to unlock in video games, and it really enhances replayability. By tossing in different new challenges, it means every game feels different.

Clear goal and clear instructions throughout: You don’t have to remember anything, or strategize per se… you just look at the card to see what you need to roll. Because the central challenge of this game is beating the clock, the simple interface is critical.

Quality production: The cards, the dice, the weight of the boards, the feeling of the gems all contribute to the enjoyment of holding the game, playing it, sitting around the table with it. The clear interface is also language-free, making it easily accessible to non-readers and worldwide where only the box and instructions need to be localized.

We have a few of the expansions, and love pulling it our for kids or adults. I think it’s a powerful game to play in a game development course or program as well.

http://www.queen-games.de/games.aspx?ProductId=8

Zombie Dice

Sometimes, the simplest games are the most fun to play, and certainly the easiest in which to distill some of the most important design characteristics! This game is a delight.

In the small little tube are 13 dice: red ones, yellow ones and green ones. Each have on them (in different ratios) brains, shotgun blasts, and keep walkin’ feet. For your turn, you randomly pull 3 dice out of the tube and roll. Your goal is to collect brains. You roll as many times as you want, drawing enough dice out of the tube to roll 3 each time. Your goal is to ultimately get 13 brains to win, and you can pass at any time. If you get brains, you keep them. If you get shotgun blasts, you keep those, and if you get walkin’ feet, you re-roll those.  Watch out: if you get 3 shotgun blasts, your turn ends and you lose whatever brains you’ve rolled that turn. A large part of this is luck and probability, but there is some amount of player control in deciding when you end your turn and pass, and when to try your luck and keep rolling.

I’ve played it probably 50 times in the past six months, and I’ve also played the app version (which is no where near as fun). So, what makes it fun?

• Accessibility and easy entry: I can pop this tube into my purse and play anywhere. The rules are simple, so I can introduce it to brand new players, and we can all be up and running in just 3 minutes. There isn’t a lot of strategy here, which  makes it easy to play.
• Balance:  The red dice have more shotgun blasts, the green dice have more brains. As you look into your hand, you have a general sense of whether you feel likely to win or likely to lose. They have selected the perfect number of red, yellow  and green dice in the tube. Occasionally, one player will get extremely lucky in a turn, rolling more than 5 brains… otherwise, you feel like everyone at the table is equally matched.
• Noise and feel: Nothing beats the sound of those dice clicking against each other and gradually coming to a stop on the table to reveal your fate. The feeling of the dice in your hand, and the noise of them as you shake the tube is so pleasing, and so empowering, you can’t help but look forward to getting them in your hand at each turn. We found in a group, it helped to encourage the group to experiment with different ways of saying, “Braiiiins” when you role. It adds to the fun. This is the critical missing component in the app… it just can’t replace the feeling of having the dice in your hand.
• Short game cycle: Want to add onlookers to your game? No problem, each round only lasts a few minutes. Feel like you are rolling especially poorly? No worries, you will be put out of your misery in 3-7 turns.

Different games are good at different things. This game is great for multi-ages, and bringing together players of different game experience and interest. It’s a good ‘first game’ for game night, because everyone can join in quickly while waiting for others to arrive or finish eating to pull out more complex board games. It’s a quick way to gather a group at a party, or to kill a few minutes at a meeting break. If you are a game developer looking at probability and balance, I’d encourage you to buy two sets of this game, and play with mixing the balance, to see how they created the optimal collection. Another good mini-study would be for game development groups to compare the real game with the app version, and see where they differ, and if both versions were necessary.

Spy

When I first saw trailers for Spy, I was disappointed in yet another movie where we would see Melissa McCarthy make gentle (or possibly crude) fun of herself for being awkward, overweight, domineering, or any of the other negative stereotypes associated with less-than-visually-perfect women. It’s not just female comedic actresses who suffer: Chris Farley was relegated to similar roles despite his own comic gifts.

Thankfully, this was not the case, by-and-large, and I enjoyed it, certainly more than other spy-themed movies of late (Kingsmen, I think we both know you lost your way, you had Michael CAINE for goodness sakes!). While there were some jokes that fell short in Spy, a few critical elements worked really well.

• Seeing Melissa McCarthy in several disguises: Not only do we see her progress through several visual styles as we would expect from a spy movie, she specifically calls out the ridiculous unfair bias in continuously casting her as the ugly cat lady, the midwest ridiculous housewife, the woman no one will whistle at. The best part is when she decides to change her image, and does so mid-movie. Shortly after, she makes another significant transition as she becomes someone else in the eyes of Rose Byrne’s disgusted character, Rayna. She moves from the ho-hum, “Well shucks, why are you being nice to me?” character, to landing a plane in crisis to f***ing telling *f***ing Rayna she’s a f***ing spoiled b****.  She transitioned as part of her character, to stay undercover, but the movie is really more about her transition than it is about spy work.
• Other characters see her transition: Even poor Rayna, as she is cuffed and led to the police car, still wants McCarthy’s Susan Cooper to work for her. In her belittling tone and annoyed eyelashes, Rayna has come to respect this woman. The best facial expression of the entire movie belongs to Rose Byrne, as Rayna responds to McCarthy’s Cooper’s “F*** YOU” with a slight grin of respect and recognition. Susan Cooper went from being invisible, to being seen clearly for all of her skill. All of her co-workers recognized it, the MI6 agent admired it, and Stratham’s hilarious Ford eventually gets it. In the end, Susan Cooper realizes she doesn’t need the respect of those around her, and returns for a girl’s night with her best friend, who knew it was inside her all along.

The character arc is so powerful: great stories let us see the changes in our characters, for good or for bad. It is especially powerful when a character transitions to something better, gets the recognition of their colleagues for that change, and realizes they don’t need the affirmation after all.

The Iron Giant

Upon reflection, I feel like I should have named this blog, Spoiler Alert! It really only matters when I talk about movies, because in dissecting how something was designed, I will talk about crucial plot elements… I am assuming that you, gentle reader, are only engaging in this blog because you want to see what someone else thinks of something you have already experienced. Besides, this blog is really for me to become a better writer and figure out what I value in designed things… and if you come along for the ride, even contribute in the comments and make it a conversation… great!

If this is not the case for you… say… if you are trying to figure out if you should watch the movie, “The Iron Giant”… stop reading now, and go watch it. 

I remember watching this when it first came out… delighting in Harry Connick Jr’s voice as the lovely beatnik metal artist, Dean, and just loving, loving, loving the movie. Now, many years later, I have the opportunity to watch it with my own boys, and through the lens of realizing this is one of Brad Bird’s creations (of The Incredibles and Tomorrowland fame, among others). I remember why I loved it as I did.

• Stellar character design:  Spend some time Googling fan-created art from this movie, and you’ll realize what an  incredibly strong visual foundation the artists gave the movie.  The voice work and casting is perfect.  Visually, from the amazing design and animation on the giant, through the snarky over-the-sunglasses looks of the beatnik, even the ever flowing locks of hairs falling from Hogarth’s mom’s bun, these characters are so… real. Not real in that they exist in this world, but real in that I have an immediate familiarity with them. Even the annoying g-man’s use of handles when talking to Hogarth, “Ain’t that right skipper, kid, ranger, kiddo,” makes me feel as though I’ve entered this story, and I know each of them and who they are already. Which is quite telling given the overriding theme of the movie.
• The overriding theme of the movie: You are who you choose to be. That’s it… that’s crucial. When you are scared, when you are angry, when you are defensive, overwhelmed, when you have to make tough choices, even when you are in love or grieving, you are who you choose to be. The movie tells us that, and shows us that. You are who you memorialize with art (as the city did with their poignant statue), who you value to spend time with (as Annie, Dean and Hogarth do at the end of the movie), and who you think you should be (as the giant decides with the deer in the woods)… and no one else can define that for you. Dean reminds Hogarth that the bullies at school can’t define him. As Kent Mansley showed us at his worst, in fear and pride, he was who he chose to be, only understanding the consequences of those choices when it seemed too late. Even at this crucial point in the movie where we think the military might be the ones responsible for the Giant’s undoing, the general reminds us that the army is only a group of people led by individuals. It is the general who returns the only found piece of the Iron Giant to Hogarth.
• Therein lies hope: I had a magical moment with my seven-year old as we watched this tonight together. He was incredibly sad as it became clear that the Giant would sacrifice himself. I wondered for a moment if we erred in showing it to him too soon… I watched as his little chest heaved a bit as he choked back a sob. As the movie made its gentle transition to the ending, I prepared for the talk I would give my son to help him deal with the loss of the beloved character. As Hogarth opened the screw… my son bolted upright… with a huge, enthusiastic look of triumph on his face. “WAIT,” he said, “remember… remember how the giant can turn on his head antenna and put himself together to be whole again? That can happen again! Remember!” He saw the hope in this movie. While we know that as adults, we don’t ever fully retrieve a loved one who is lost to us, there is beauty in knowing that the spirit of a good person lives on. And while we are living, no one is fully lost when they can choose to be someone different, someone better. THAT is the basis of hope in who we each are.

What I loved about Tomorrowland was the spirit of hopefulness, and particularly in how that hope was tied with science and progress and unity. I felt the movie was a bit heavy handed in hitting us over the head a bit too much with the theme and message. In The Iron Giant, the theme is clearly stated, and referenced throughout, but the movie does not suffer from this heavy handedness. I can’t explain the difference in why it worked in one, and not the other. Thoughts?

And oh, holy cow, look what I just found! The Iron Giant will return to theaters this September! 

Incidentally, this would look awesome in my office. Or this. Or this. Just sayin’.

¡Explora! Museum

http://www.explora.us

I was so inspired by this Albuquerque museum, I have created an entire talk around it as an exemplar for what makes learning fun (and you can view one version of it as a webinar).  So, what is it that makes the popular museum so engaging, appealing, and enjoyable?

• Open-ended and self-directed learning: true play involves open ended learning: kids can make their own rules, or explore without them. Exhibits here offer light structure which kids are often free to ignore (“What happens to this stream of water when you blink the strobe light?”, “Walk slowly past this sculpture and notice what happens to the eyes.”), but encourages free play. At the 20-foot long water table, kids can try to build a path that makes the water flow faster, or shape the flow so that a ball goes backwards *towards* the water source, or just splash.  This open ended approach is prevalent in every area (except, perhaps, the bicycle on the wire, which kids can ride 3 stories overhead… that seems fairly straightforward).
• Guidance where appropriate: Vygotsky called this the “more capable other”. Each exhibit has some kind of writing that a learner can read (or a parent can), encourages more than one person to play at a time (with two stools at a table, for example), and staff are throughout. If you don’t understand an exhibit, and aren’t comfortable with free-play… guidance is easily accessible.
• Interactive: Certainly, exhibits at Explora! are hands on, players learn by doing, and fail by doing, and try again by doing.
• Immediate feedback: One of the lovely hallmarks of hands-on learning is immediate feedback. If you are trying to slide a wooden disc up a slanted piece of wood, and it drops into one of the forbidden holes on the board, you know you failed. You press a button on the laminar fountain, and you see which stream of water you pulsed. You roll a ball down a custom-made track and it plops perfectly into the box, you know your angle is exactly right. This is so given in the real world, we sometimes forget the value of the immediacy when creating virtual experiences.
• Multimedia: Most exhibits involve more than one sense. You hear, see, observe, feel, listen. You can certainly *hear* the difference between octaves when notes are played on a keyboard, but here, you are also invited to *feel* the difference, as you sit on a wooden bench with a speaker mounted underneath. It isn’t used in a gimmicky way, rather as a way to invite you to experience something from multiple perspectives.
• Age-appropriate: My kids have been here *many* times, and they take something different away each time. It’s a specific gift to be able to build an experience that works for short toddlers who are just exploring with their hands and love the carpeting as much as the learning opportunity, and for pre-teens who demand more of an ‘aha’ moment.
• Disequilibration: One of Piaget’s concepts, learners experience disequilibration when they are confused in a good way, when they sense something that operates differently than their brain expects it to. How is that beach ball floating in mid air? Why can I see both Einstein and Marilyn Monroe in the same portrait? Why is there an entire living room in the elevator? Disequilibration often prompts children to move from one developmental or learning stage to the next, but it also usually yields pure delight when we are first surprised, and then we understand.

These key characteristics are crucial — not just in seeing why learning is engaging, but in understand what makes something *fun*. We so often try to dress up learning in fun ways, without understanding that with the right framing, learning is inherently an engaging and fun activity, one we are predisposed to enjoy! Each of these can be purposefully infused into learning games and experiences, if we are able to identify them, and work towards their implementation.

Cliff’s Amusement Park

http://cliffsamusementpark.com

It’s been around since before I was born, and I certainly have memories of this “small town theme park” (which really isn’t quite so small-town anymore). Like other Albuquerque attractions, I figure I have visited Cliff’s 20-30 times… as a kid, adult, and now as a parent.

It’s easy to look at large parks, like Disneyland or Busch Gardens and see specific areas of strength. What sets apart the smaller parks? What creates an enjoyable visit for parents, kids, teens and the like?

Other than that one time I played quite a bit of Roller Coaster Tycoon, I have zero knowledge of theme park design or operations. I do know what we enjoyed about our most recent visit:

• 

  This shady area is right in the middle of Kiddieland. From here, parents can watch their kids run around to ALL the nearby rides.

  Shady areas to sit and watch the kids: This may not seem like a design element but it’s critical. Kids want to run around and feel empowered to make some of their own decisions, and parents want to keep a watchful eye at a distance. Besides, the average adult can only take the Sea Dragon viking boat ride SO many times… amIright? Give us a place to watch, with easy access to cool drinks, in the center of the action: our kids will feel free, and we will feel as though they are safe.

• Looking around is best navigational tool: Cliff’s has a lot packed into a small space. It’s easy to exit one ride, and immediately seen entrances to 3-4 other attractions. This flow from one attraction is something the larger parks do effortlessly: seeing it in a smaller park is nice, too.

• 

  This giant clown face is about 7 feet tall, only a little creepy, and burned into my brain from frequent visits as a kid. When I see it, I instantly remember I am ‘home’.

  Nostalgia warms my heart: I want my kids to have fun, and I want to remember the fun that I had. I expect the park to be newer, bigger, better than when I was a kid, but I appreciate a gentle nod to my memories. While some of my favorite rides are now gone, I love seeing a familiar face.

• Instant access: Obviously, the best line queue is a short one. This is more important for interactive design than theme park: the experience should be worth the anticipation built while waiting. When a ride only lasts a few minutes, and part of that is spent in understanding tricky interfaces (I’m looking at you, bumper cars!) the wait just isn’t worth it. Larger parks make wait time in line queues part of the experience. Here, the lines queues are shorter, but you can almost always see the entire ride while you are waiting.

Similar to app design, a theme park is never ‘finished’, every summer simply provides a newer version than the last. I’m assuming the park designers let core principles for user enjoyment (not just market data) guide them through each iteration, as well as user testing, even with a park this size. I have yet to have a bad experience here, and more often than not, it’s a high point of each trip home.

—-

Update: I posted to Twitter that I felt shade was the most important part of a theme-park experience, but that I was having trouble tying that to game design. I loved these posts in response and wanted to note them here:

• Michael John @MichaelMJJohn: shade is where you rest; you have a moment between interactions which is restorative. I’d argue ‘pacing’ is similar.
• Dan Magaha  @dgackey: cover/darkness in stealth games.
• Daren Carstens @mathdoodles: Design for more than the experience of active players. Design for the experience of onlookers or players waiting their turn.
• Wobbles @wobbles: in my mind it would be easy break points for longer games. End of the level/save points.

Laser Tag

I’m 43, and just played my first game of laser tag. I don’t know why it took me so long, either.

It’s basically a competitive shooting game, where you play on teams with and against people you don’t know, who represent a huge diversity in skill level and experience, in a dark room, with no strategy or clear direction. So, what makes it work?

• Immediate, clear feedback: My vest is blue, unless I’ve been hit, and then the lights flash white and then turn off for 3 seconds until I am allowed to shoot again. I know the second I hit someone that I hit them, I can see my laser cut through the air to their vest (and their’s to mine), and I can read my status on the back of my gun. I know exactly how long I have until I am allowed to shoot again, because the readout on my gun tells me. I even know if I was hit in the back or the front. When we only have 20 minutes to play, this clarity is crucial in reducing frustration.
• Clear goal with multiple ways to win, multiple ways to analyze progress: The game works like capture the flag. As a member of the blue team, I wanted to keep red team members from shooting my base, and I wanted to go shoot their base. I could ‘succeed’ by defense, offense, or personal sniper stats. At the end, I received a custom printout that showed how many shots I took, made, my efficiency, number of times I was hit in front and back, how many times I shot the enemy base, where I ranked with my team. I could have decided I wanted to improve my  accuracy, try something new to win when playing a second time, or just ‘never get shot in the back’. The game is played exactly the same every time, but in varying my feedback and goals, I get to customize it each time to be unique for me.
• Clear training upfront: I was nervous: I was with a bunch of teens that looked confident and competent, and I’ve seen how horribly I suck at Halo. I felt like I would be wandering around trying to figure out my gun while everyone and his kid brother just kept shooting at me. The initial video spelled it out for me,  gave me an idea of exactly how to hold the gun, and what it looked like when someone was tagged. This decreased my trepidation in a huge way. Granted, everyone and his kid brother was shooting at me, but I felt like I got a few good ones in anyway.
• Access to a real person for help: I don’t want to complain about my low accuracy in the second round… but, um, my gun wasn’t working. I kept getting the “use two hands” warning. I understood what it meant, but I couldn’t figure out how to help it. Enter the teenage kid at the end of his shift who was walking slowly through the course with a fluorescent orange vest: I quickly told him the problem, he showed me the solution, and I was back on my way. This immediate problem solving got me back in the game quickly.
• Clear length of time: I knew going in how long it would take, how much to push myself, and had a sense of how quickly the time was going. This lens helps my mind figure out what to do, and I like that.

I’m reflecting quickly on the basic components of good gameplay, and I know I could make this list a lot longer: for now, I think it’s enough to reflect on these essentials. Now, I’ve got to go figure out if anyone wants to go to a laser tag party for someone turning 44.

Jurassic World

I read the first book, saw the first two movies, and had a fairly good idea of what I would get in this 4th theatrical iteration of the Jurassic series.  Still, the movie worked and I enjoyed it. Here’s why:

• Respectful nod to the first movie: by having a character straight up say in the movie that “the first park was LEGIT”, it includes everyone in the audience in the joke. The first movie was subtly referred to throughout: professor Ian Malcolm was cleverly calling out to us from the back of a book we glanced in a few scenes;  the banner that fell so dramatically at the end of the first movie literally provided light and guidance to the characters exploring in this one, when it was burned as a torch; in different scenes we saw the cool night-vision goggles, John Hammond’s amber cane, the iconic opening gates. When doing a follow-up, don’t pretend you are covering new territory: embrace was was good in the first one and let the audience know you are doing it in a playful, purposeful way.
• It created a world I wanted to be in: Granted, the minute we realized a couple getting a divorce is sending their kids to a theme park with dinosaurs, we know it will end poorly. Yet… I wanted to be in those kayaks paddling along next to the Brontosaurus, I wanted to see the T-Rex eat the goat, I wouldn’t have minded being in that hamster ball either. I wanted to be in this world, and was immediately invested in the outcome of the world, not just in the outcome of the key characters.
• The graphics were amazing: I’m usually the one to point out that we don’t care about graphics as much as people think we do, but in a movie like this, our eyes want to linger. The integration of digital creatures in the real world was seamless, without jerky animation or weird color matching. For this movie to work, that had to be perfect.
• The evil villain is a changin’: OK… the bad guy in this movie was waaay to obvious… I thought the 80s meant we could leave the obvious Boss Hogg bad guy out… and here we had him. He takes others’ drinks, he smiles at the death of others, and he wants to militarize dinosaurs as weapons. I’m done with him. Increasingly, I like movies that show no villain (Inside Out), or a complex or misunderstood villain (Malificent), or a villain who is the way he is because he made different choices than our hero when given similar circumstances (Big Hero 6)… and I’m not alone. While I could leave the InGEN dude out of this movie, we had to have someone who’s pride would goeth before the fall, and he drew the short straw. More importantly, we saw animal villains in this movie, and it wasn’t always clear whose side they were on. Audiences of all media are accepting more complex examples of good and bad, and I like that.

In many ways, this movie followed its established formula perfectly. We may tire of it eventually, but key components worked so well, they should be considered standards for future development of many different types of experiences.