Designing to constraints (airport games)

[Wordman]

I can't tell if this post is really intended to design a real game, or just tripping over beehives. I think it is the former, but given my recent ranting against "what is your game about", it might come across as (and, heck, may actually be) the latter. Bear with me.

The general notion comes from a twelve hour delay I had on a flight from JFK to Athens (broken up into many 40 minute delays in a row, of course). During this time, I started thinking about what kind of role-playing could be done in this environment. My first realization is that gaming in such a place has many things working against it:

• Lack of tables: some gaming experiences center around a table or, at minimum, assume the presence of a decent writing surface, or perhaps a "central area". Games that require such (even many card games) either don't work in such an area or are awkward.
  
• Limited randomness options: Unless everyone is carrying dice, if you want randomness generation, a deck of standard playing cards is about the best you can hope for finding in your average airport.
  
• Noise: airports are usually fairly loud, making games reliant on lots of verbal communication harder.
  
• Public: airports are built around lots of public spaces. You might get lucky and find a little nook someplace, but generally you will be surrounded by other people, many of whom will be able to hear and watch you. Among other considerations, this may serve to censor game content.
  
• Strangers: You will know very few of the people around you, but some of them may be your potential players. Strangers or not, it is likely that players will have to be taught the game on the spot.
  
• Distracting: airports are constantly interrupting you with announcements about one thing or another, some of which may be crucial to you. You might also have to deal with gate changes and so on.
  
• Time limited: You might have only have an hour or so for a game, depending on how long your delay is. It's also possible that players might be waiting for different flights, so not everyone will have the same time constraint.
  
• Unpredictable: That hour you think you have for the game might, at any minute, become two hours. Or, once the hour is up, you might find out you now have to wait longer. This would lend itself to "episodic" games, where you could end the game at one point, but then picking right back up when you are re-delayed.
  
• Paranoia: In most airports, staff and (to a lesser extent) passengers will think differently about certain topics that often show up in role-playing games, such as guns and explosives, than they would outside the airport. In some parts of an airport, for example, even joking about bombs is a felony.
  

The second realization I had was that the standard "what is your game about"/figure out themes and design principles, then figure out how mechanics can support that and such isn't the most natural path to design here. For example, say you happen to be reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and wanted to make a game about how to keep your maidenly virtue, family honor and decorum and still land a husband, while simultaneously being a stone cold zombie killer. The most likely result is that walking down that path to build that game would lead to a game that simply wouldn't be playable in the constraints of an airport. It's, no doubt, possible to design for both, of course, but it seems to me that a more natural design path would be something more inverted, like this:

1) Figure out what kind of mechanics and systems are even functionally possible given the constraints of an airport.
2) Figure out which of these actually work well, given the constraints.
3) Understand the mechanics well enough to determine what kind of game they would support.
4) Select a theme and purpose that its lends itself to and is supported by those mechanics.
5) Tune the game to the theme and purpose.

Of these, given the airport constraints, it seems to me that #2 is really the design challenge in this case. Item #4 is not easy, either, but it seems to me the greatest risk there is self-delusion. That is, convincing yourself that the mechanic supports a theme that it doesn't.

This kind of "constraint-based design" seems like it inverts the "preferred" order of things, because the mechanics, once chosen, are of necessity fairly rigid, and you have to use fluid thinking and a lot of flexibility to select theme and purpose, whereas the "what is your game about" path does the opposite.

One type of mechanic that might work OK in this setting is something based on Blind Man's Bluff (the card game where you hold a card against your forehead, and you see everyone's cards except your own). It is mostly visual, doesn't require a table, supports a fairly wide range of players and is relatively easy to learn.

Before I go down this path very far, questions for people:

1) What existing games might lend themselves to play in an airport?

2) Do any games exist that use "Blind Man's Bluff"-inspired mechanics?

3) Can you think of other systems that would work well given an airport's constraints?

4) Are there any games that have been made following a "constraint-based design"?

5) Is this constraint-based approach just as valid as the "what is your game about" approach? Why or why not?

[HeTeleports]

Regarding 4) and 5) ...
Plato's Socrates would remind you that "necessity is the mother of invention."
While it might be difficult to imagine a 'travel' version of D&D, Milton Bradley devised a way to make a travel version of Scrabble. If you think about it, that's some kind of amazing.

Especially regarding question 5, this approach is absolutely valid. And the “airport lay-over” target market could be really big. I’m imagining something cool.

[Librabys]

1- I dont know all games, but I think a lite version of big eyes small mouth is may be a beginning, i explain it later

2- rock-paper-cisors maybe, if i understand your concept well

3- Speak about it later

4 and 5- yes and yes


Or now, about mechanics that could work, I remeber when I was still a teenage knowing barely AD&D, Vampires and Shadowrun, I`ve been very impressed by yhe extreme simplicity of `big eyes, small mouth` system, a generic rpg for anime-maga like adventure, from the girl in school to the mechas.

What is nice about it is the it have only 3 stats: body, mind, soul. After you have to pick one or two flaws, some skills, you write a fast background and you are done. the game was playing with D6s if my memory serves me well.

I was also interested by the concept of playing ''on the fly'', with few support, no references to tables, few time, or simply to play with newbies without to explain a full load of details.

I thought about a version ultra-lite of my game, Aethera, and i am still not finished the Big brother so the little is waiting, but i have these goals: 1) the character sheet must hold on piece of napkin and be done in 5 minutes
2) every rule must be remeberable so it have no tables 3) I must be able to explain the rules, create characters, and play a session with newbies all inside short times like one hour or half an hour.

from these goals I decided the character creation would look like this:

3 sentences: 1)Who is the character (personality).  2)where does s/he come from(background).   3)what does s/he look like.
- Only 3 attributes: physical, mental, social. you place them in preference order by example physical 3, mental 2, social 1.
-Only 3 skills, one lvl3, one lvl2 and one lvl1. if magic or martial arts are chosed, you have a limit of (mental+skill lvl) spells or techniques.
-sommary equipment. (somethin like: pick five items)

All of this would play well with D6 i thought but well, why not rock paper scisors... it is so easy to carry
playin cards are also an option but finally I don`t think it suit this mechanic very well...

I will keep working on it and share my ideas good luck!

[Doplegager]

1) What existing games might lend themselves to play in an airport?

2) Do any games exist that use "Blind Man's Bluff"-inspired mechanics?

3) Can you think of other systems that would work well given an airport's constraints?

4) Are there any games that have been made following a "constraint-based design"?

5) Is this constraint-based approach just as valid as the "what is your game about" approach? Why or why not?

I can really only speak to question 3 and 4:

There are a lot of similarities between this and some approaches I've been considering a lot. Without having much experience with it, I love the idea of public gaming. At one point, I was playing with mechanics based around restaurants, where game currency was based on drinks (a glass of water, refillable, for most conflicts, and a non-refillable drink, like liquor or juice, for major conflicts; your creative bid was based on how much you drank. Throw in holding certain silverware you talk for fiddling with rules: having your hand on a knife while talking v. having your hand on a spoon).

In my ponderings, I usually focused on narrative structures that might seem like casual conversation. The working title for the 'drinking' game was "Waiting for Godot", and the point was that all the players were waiting for someone- the game being filling out the details of how they knew him/her and who he/she actually was. Taking a drink was a challenge to narrative input: "Why no, sir (gulp of water) As I recall, he was late that night because he was signing a new contract in Hollywood."

Another version was a study group set-up, where players turned to random pages for a resolution mechanic while discussing a fictitious character or event; "According to page 53, he was actually a double agent." Again, the narrative structure was designed to mask itself, with the resolution mechanic reinforcing the facade.

With more traditional games, I've also been enamored with using Sudoku puzzles as random number generators. You could, in theory, grab a book of Sudoku and play a boiled down version of d20 dnd. Just flip to the back of the book, pick one of the 'answered' grids, and mark off two results to get a result between 2 and 20. Add skill and ability mods from a quick character generation and you're good to go: "I attack the goblin with my short sword" (DM marks off two results) "You hit!" (DM marks off a result for damage) "The goblin falls to the ground!".

[JoyWriter]

You can consider all design as constraint based, with you trying to grab together a load of elements/feelings/situations that you feel should go together to make a whole. The question of why you want to though, that answers what it's about!

Designing a game to pass time in an airport, that's one half of the puzzle, but what is it that you want the game to add to that airport situation? What kind of thing do you want to preserve of "tabletop rpg", as you chop away other elements? Now maybe you don't know exactly what it is at this stage, but if you want to make some game presumably you have a vague picture of what they will be up to. That systemic whole with it's own identity, that signature of play in your game, is the main thing, however you express it.

Now to make that more specific, if as you look through all the things you could do in an airport, from that wast array of group activities something will include choices and latching points for imagination. When you start looking at that, you can find what interests you about that system and expand it, dig into it and make your approach to it more substantial. In my understanding at least, it's not that you can give the theme a nice name, but that you can design towards it. That includes playtesting too, you need to know what you're after enough that when people play a game of this in an airport somewhere, and they say ___ happened, you can decide if that fits your intentions or not, if it produced the magic you were going for.

So on a "blind mans bluff" game (I had to check what you meant because where I come from "blind man's buff" is a totally different game), I'll try to answer your question by doing it myself! I hesitate to add anything to what is an elegant and amusing game already, so to capture some of the same ideas, I'd make a game based on character information that was hidden from the player supposed to be playing them. Perhaps something like "False accusation" where you have to work out what you supposedly did to appropriately pass on the blame or plead guilty, with external rules of the airport stopping the game getting too carried away.

[Vladius]

It's a great idea, and I was thinking along similar lines while waiting at the airport (though BWI, not JFK, and it didn't take 12 hours.)

It's a good thing that that you've made some assumptions here about time, resources, etc., as those are vitally important to how you'll want to economize this type of game.
I envision something like this:
The world is falling into "decay," meaning that various things from it are just disappearing at will, while other things are entering from other universes that are filling in the gaps. So all of the player characters are random people with completely made up back stories. Their traits and abilities are all simplified and applied based on their back story, and everyone will be completely different. The format might be more like a party game, with you describing your character with "I am ______, I am a ______ who comes from ______ and can do ______."

[HeTeleports]

A party game that depends/relies on Player Characters cycling through -- to make the airport game self-sustaining long after the original player made his flight -- could become a big hit.

[Guy Srinivasan]

A party game that depends/relies on Player Characters cycling through -- to make the airport game self-sustaining long after the original player made his flight -- could become a big hit.

Oh, my. That would be fantastic.