Where investment seeds

[talysman]

here's the test: if the ladders were changed into balloons, the snakes into anvils, and the pawns were shaped like cartoon cats, dogs, mice, and tweetie birds, would that have changed play?

Would it change the mechanical progress of the game?  No.  Would it change the experience of the game?  Yes.

Color has no mechanical effect -- that does not mean it has no experiential effect.  In fact, Color's experiential effect is why it's there, why it's one of the five components, and why it heightens intensity -- its sole purpose is to create that kind of engagement that Callan is talking about.

really? I would say that the primary purpose -- if not the sole purpose -- of Color in an RPG is to tie the Characters, Setting and Situation to the Fiction as a whole.

and what I am saying above is that Color in a board game does not serve this purpose, so it won't help the art of RPG design to study Color in board games (except in the sense of studying art design for marketing purposes.)

[Callan S.]

I'd agree it isn't intended to serve that purpose in boardgame design...boardgame colour just provokes the imagination as an unintentional side effect, which board games don't utilise.

But whatever colours intended effect in board games, it does get a player jazzed about the colour involved.

[M. J. Young]

Just a quick note on a side point:

I see a number of popular boardgames, both kids games and adult games where it almost appears that gamism is tacked on. I'm thinking of things like Charades (the traditional game), but also Trivial Pursuit and Cadoo ( and sister games). In these games, it seems like the gamist winning is often, in actual play, extremely secondary to the actual enjoyment of the game ( which is usually the mid-game activity). Is there an implication here for rpg design and rpg marketing?

The gamism in Trivial Pursuit (the example on which I can most easily focus) is the actual enjoyment of the game; the "winning" is part of the reward system which attempts to provide secondary support for that activity. Gamism is about bragging rights, remember? When in Trivial Pursuit it asks me a question and I give the right answer, I've just showed off my skill at knowing the answers to these kinds of questions. When I have answered twelve in a row and managed to pull a wedge from it, not only do I get the in-game reward of adding that wedge to my playing piece, I also get the real and totally gamist reward of having the other players "totally impressed" with that--whether they express it by cheering me on or by raising the bar for themselves to try to beat me.

Oh, and the fact that you can deflect blaster blasts with a lightsaber does not make it less color, because you can, in the right game, deflect arrows with a sword, and I'm sure that the lightsaber itself does not deflect the blaster blasts but the skill of the user. The "color" is not that this is a weapon that can be used offensively and defensively, but that it is some sort of high-tech light-based version of such a weapon.

--M. J. Young

[Callan S.]

Rob alexander brought up another investment garnering technique in another thread. I think it's very useful for this thread.

Liking stuff between dungeons isn't automatically simulationism. It's easily a renewal process of investment, getting jazzed up about the game world and pumped to play. What you do when you play, shows your prefered agenda. What you do to get pumped up tells us nothing about agenda.

That makes sense. Kind of like the cut scenes in a computer game; you're not really playing (since you're basically on rails) but you still enjoy it, and it "renews you investment" as you describe. The actual play resumes when you start the next level / enter the dungeons.

I'll add my reply, where I wonder about a traditional gamer habits getting in the way of investment:

Yes, cut scenes are an excellent example of an investment inspiring technique! It's probably anti roleplay to many traditional players though "If I can't do anything, then it's not roleplay and I simply must not invest in anything there". It's probably a battered gamer syndrome thing...cut scenes are supposed to tease the players (like the principles behind a strip tease), but many poor GM's drag them out as much as they like, excluding any actual play. To put it crudely, that's blueballing rather than a tease.

[Callan S.]

Oh, another idea is mutual risk. An analogy would be a tug of war with mud in the middle, between the two teams. Now, imagine just being pushed into that mud...it would suck. But imagine being dragged into the mud by the other team...not so bad, eh? Because perhaps you could have dragged them into it.

I think alot of older RPG's have relied on the GM to push people into the mud, so to speak, and yet the GM has to cope with the flack from that. With indie games now there seems to be a real tendency to put everyone at risk, and thus everyone is comfortable to invest in the game more than in a game where the GM just pushes them at will. More investment means better play.