[Heads of State: rest & relaxation] first play test

[redivider]

Summary: the table was strewn with a week's worth of the L.A. Times, a pop-psyche pyramid graced the white board, the players were engaged & entertained (I think) but left wondering what exactly they had just experienced and how it could be (and should it be) shaped into a fully functional game.

Earlier this week our new game play/design group kicked off with an in- person play test of Rest & Relaxation (R&R). It's the first game from my Heads of State: Nine Short Games about Tyrant to get a test run. ( http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=13029.0 is the last time I posted on these games).

R&R is gm-less, so there were five players. Alex, Christopher, Joshua, Judson, and Mark (me). Our short play & discussion session answered the top questions I had about the game, which was helpful – and turned up many new questions, which was even more helpful.

R&R is a hybrid with parlor game, role playing, and board game elements. Players take the roles of former dictators who meet regularly in their city of exile to commiserate with each other and to read newspapers that have just arrived from their homelands. The exiled Tyrants immerse themselves in stacks of weeks-old papers, greedy for news from home. When they come across stories that seem to hold tidbits of significant information, they interrupt their fellow exiles, read parts of the paper aloud, and offer their own spin on the news.

We started by establishing that our dictators were meeting in Monaco sometime in the 1970s. We decided to play the  'climbing Mt. vengeance track' of the game in which our dictators had each been in exile around ten years and were trying to rouse themselves out of their habits and gloom to make one last play for a return to power. Next we wrote down and then shared a few facts about our tyrant (name, name of country we used to rules, our ideology, the ideology of the leader(s) who followed us, the name of the newspaper we were receiving from abroad, and how we lost power). Alex was a Latin American caudillo whose name or title translated something like 'the proud star of freedom.' Christopher had a Central European tyrant (Karpowski?) whose ideology was all about his own absolute rule. Joshua's exiled Central Asian ruler was a Stalinist expelled by Marxist-Leninists. Judson's Carpathian monarch pined for the days when his peasants treated him as a wise father. My dictator in exile was a francophone Pan-African Marxist.

Next we each grabbed an issue of the paper, found a story, and spent a few minutes subtly altering the headline and/or lead sentences to transform the stories into articles that appear in our home country newspapers and that would serve as jumping off points for the exiled tyrants to comment on some aspect of their former life or current hopes. We each read & commented on our stories and announced which of the three psychological states on the bottom level of the game's pyramidal track we were aiming for (self pity, resignation, or nostalgia). The first two rounds we chose our own stories. The third and final round, following some discussion, we decided to pick stories and give them to other players to transform so as to increase the challenge and to allow for some more interaction and dialogue between players.

The 15 stories we used varied widely, from front page articles in the main news section to 'dear abby' columns to op-eds to high school basketball reports. One of my favorites was the home section article on what colors are 'in' in 2006 that Joshua spun to have his dictator comment: 'see, they left out Orange just to spite me. They knew that my regime flew orange flags over every building, that I rode in an imposing orange limousine ...' I can totally picture all the school children in that country forced to wear scratchy orange pioneer outfits, little orange books of the leader's sayings being de rigueur accessories, etc.

We all rose to the challenge of interpreting assorted stories from current newspapers to as if we were exiled dictator. It was fun hearing the other players twist and riff off the articles. I think we did an excellent job of making creative leaps and using articles about X to illustrate point Y that we wanted our tyrant to make. We did a good job portraying our dictator's moods as they leafed through the papers and reacted to news from home. However we were less successful is using the stories/comments to establish facts and anecdotes about our dictators' life histories, regimes, overthrow, or plans to regain power. I can think of a few reasons why we didn't hit these life history points. I didn't emphasize strongly enough when explaining the game that this was a goal. The rules also didn't provide an incentive to reveal these facts (the rules do incentivize showing your tryant's mood/psychological state). And it's hard to come up with life histories on the fly especially when you are focusing on altering a paper & keeping in a particular mode.)

Meanwhile the other players graded our efforts. Stories get ranked under three criteria. You get 0-2 points for reading & commenting in a way that's appropriate for the psychological state you are in; 0-2 points based on well your story flows from/ adapts the real newspaper story; and 0-2 points based on how interesting the story/comments are.

After a round of comments, we revealed how we had ranked each other's stories, averaged the scores, and marked down between 0-6 boxes in the appropriate psychological area (I think we all scored between 3-5.) As an illustration, Christopher and I had both started out in the Resignation area and we both received 4 points the first round. The areas have 15 boxes, so 8 out of 15 were filled in. Next round I received 3 points and Christopher got 4. The Resignation area was full and since Christopher had the most boxes of any the players in the area, he moved up to the next level of the pyramid, and we erased his initial from the 8 boxes he had filled.

Most everyone had some issues with the pyramid track and the race aspect of the game. Was it possible to play strategically and was this competitive aspect of the game even relevant for my goals for the project? These issues spun off into a broader discussion of goals and options. I'm listing some of the questions that I came away with:

1.   What were my goals for R&R? This one I'll answer. To challenge players to use/transform newspaper articles as sparks for dictator's rant. To explore the topic of "the tyrant" through the window of dictators in exile. To use pop-psychology tracks as the framework for pacing and ending play.
2.   Is R&R a game or some other kind of creative activity (that doesn't require competitive rules & a defined end point)?
3.   Should players create an exiled dictator and tell the other players who they are at the start of the game; create a tyrant and let other players try to guess facts about the dictator that are revealed/implied as stories are told; or start with a blank slate and establish facts about your dictator with each round of articles?
4.   If the game has different mental states, should they be linked in a competitive race or should players be able to move between them at their choice, or some hybrid?
5.   Should players pick their own articles; choose articles for other players; or some combination?
6.   Should I change the ranking system so you don't give points for 'interesting stories' but instead for 'stories that reveal an interesting fact/anecdote about the dictator's life and plans.'?
7.   If the 'Mt. vengeance' pyramid is retained, should players decide and reveal which state they are in (so as to maximize strategic possibilities.)?

Hopefully some of the other players will add their thoughts on the experience; they all dove fully into the playtest and posed some good questions/ suggestions.

If anyone wants to read (or try) R&R or any of the other 8 short games about tyrants, send me a message.

mark

[Josh Roby]

I had a blast playing Chairman Kerzhina from the People's Republic of Turgaschneckdistan!

The thing that struck me most about the game, both during and after, was how really demented the twists and reinterpretations we foisted on those papers were.  Christopher's turning "Albertsons split into three" into "Albert split into three" and then identifying Albert as his son was perfect.  The fact that I recognized most of the (non-Sports) stories, too, was very interesting.  "You took Schwartzenegger and turned it into that?!?"  I would find a "guess what story I used" mechanic interesting, but I'm not sure how universally applicable it would be to non-newsjunkies like me.

I did find the game to lack much in-character interaction.  We interacted as players when we voted and revealed what story was the inspiration for our tirade, but I, as Chairman Kerzhina, did not get to turn to Judson's exiled Duke and banter about keeping the little people under your thumb.  I'm not sure that that is really towards the thrust of the game, but I knew I wanted to throw in interjections to others' stories or something similar.

I'd actually disagree that we didn't reveal many personal details.  In retrospect, we heard about Christopher's airfield and his son, my national color of orange, Mark's people's struggles against Western postcolonial influences, Alex's parliament and his extended family all installed in different positions of power, and Judson's coal mines and his relationship with his people.  I feel like I could play any of the other games in the set with any of those tyrants as the focus.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi guys,

My take is this: while I found the exercise engaging, that's exactly what it was to me -- an exercise.

I was startled when the rest of the gang started talking about the immersive elements.

For me the game was mostly a parlour game -- take these words, put them in the blender, produce this result. It depened on a kind of editorial cleverness and less any kind of connection to the events I related nor the POV of the dictator I "represented."

But... the game itself had no real way to "win." The game element was squishy. If there were right or wrong choices to jocky for position on the track not only could I not see them, but but the scoring process seemed rigged to make the results of our success become almost random in the effort to reach the top of the pyramid. (We all, if I remember correctly, agreed that this was the case during one of the talk-about-the-game breaks.)

I realized later that when I play Pictionary or whatever I'm not particularly interested in the thing I'm doing (the drawing, the  miming, whatever), but the winning. The actions are only steps to winning. In fact, the first time I played Pictionary I was so focused on actually DRAWING that my team kept losing. It's not about Drawing. It's about knocking out clues to score points.

I see Mark's agenda for R&R -- to actually get me invovled in the doing of the activity. But for me, as I said, it was sort of a bit of knocked off cleverness to come up with the switcheroos. Since I knew I couldn't win by doing them, nor was I particularly engaged with the words spoken (though always amused) it became, for me, a very ritualized sitting-around-shooting-the-shit joke session. Like something you might do on the fly at a pizza place by picking up the extra papers lying around and someone saying, "Hey, what if we were all exiled dictators and we were reading news from our homelands."

I don't know whether this is good or bad. I do know that when I was reading the rules for the game.... How do I say this: Mark has I think an excellent style and an obvious love of the subject matter. On each page he has a kind of academic footnote listing some sort of horribly strange/funny/bizzare/terrible incident from the actual life of actual dictators.

These incidents, though real, are so outlandish (for example, the sons of an assassinated dictator putting the assissins in a cage next to other caged animals in the palace's private zoo), that when I read the rules, my imagination ran off to nightmarish magical realism mix of Phillip K. Dick, Borgess and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I wanted to be CHILLED by the ideas we came up with... Because dictators are ultimately just humans, too.

Mark has a phrase on the first page of the rules that jumped out at me: "Dictators are a guilty pleasure." YES! EXACTLY!"

But that night I felt like I did my part when my turn came, and enjoyed the word play shananigans of all involved. But I did not feel any sort of guilty pleasure. Which is sort of what I really wanted.

Whether this can be done. Whether it's a good idea, I don't know. But it is what I wanted.

Still, I'm glad I was there. I do believe Mark is on his way to something really cool. I can't wait to see how it develops.

Christopher

[redivider]

I'm interested that Christopher didn't get the sense of chill/guilty pleasure he wanted & I didn't see as much life history/revelatory anecdotes as I had hoped. Josh is right that there were these moments - but there should be a way for the rules to draw them out on a more consist or intentional basis. In the intro to Heads of State I mention three justifications for games about dictators: the guilty pleasure justification, the modern day affliction (human rights/political analysis) justification, and the enigma (life history/ psychological) justification. I should try to turn these into modes of play and/or link them with the voting or with players awarding bonus points or something.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Mark,

Have you seen the game Baron Munchausen.

I suddenly thought of it in the context of your last post.

The game is about improvised, outlandish storytelling. But it's a Gamist game -- you top each other for points.

It seems a brilliant fit for the kind of thing you're going for -- Dictators don't just happen to do horrible things. They want to overscale everyone else's horrible things.

A game using something like the Baron Munchausen engine would encourage people to come up with tales of greater and greater depravity, horror, outlandish expenditures of wealth, obscene fantasies of... well, whatever...

This would drive directly to Guilty Pleasures -- as well as the other justifications you listed.

I guess my thinking here is this:

Simply awarding points isn't really a reward. What people respond to (either positively or negatively) is what they are DOING. (In fact, even in the real world, extrinsic rewards (such as cash) fail as true motivation for people -- what makes people work hard is work they're passionate about or a passion for working.)

Using Munchausen, where the players get the guilty pleasure of being monstrous creeps makes perfect sense to me. I mean, then you'd be doing it -- building ANY fantasy, no matter how self-indulgent or grotesque you wanted. That's what dictators DO, after all. Right?

Just a thought.

Christopher

[Josh Roby]

Dictators don't just happen to do horrible things. They want to overscale everyone else's horrible things.

I was just thinking along similar lines.  Instead of rating the stories we tell, what happens if we start ranking the stories?  What if, out of every round, you voted on who had the Most Outlandish, the Most Disturbing, and the Most Human stories or somesuch?