Snakes and ladders is an amazing game. I recommend all Forgites play it again sometime soon if you haven't recently. Preferably with someone young and excitable!

What amazes me is that there is ZERO player input. You do nothing, it's all dice rolls. Yet it engages a level of excitement regardless. It often starts with someone getting a lead (perhaps even a major lead, by climbing a ladder). There's that sense of gambling satisfaction or even a feeling of 'I am the one to win' and bang, that persons invested in the games result. This investment is detected by the other players and then flows through them, who suddenly don't want the other person to be able to hold a win over them. Follow through with hopes literally rising and falling along with ladder or snake and even more investment occurs. It's an amazing design!

Taking it a step further, sans any other human to give feedback to further a players investment is progress quest.

It's a satirical game, poking fun at the grind of fantasy roleplay games. You start the program, type in your PC's name and hit go. Everything else is automated…you watch a progress bar sliding across the bottom as your PC beats a monster. Once it's slid across, other bars like XP or your treasure list slide along a little bit.

I like it. I have a level fifty one character (nearly level fifty two). I did zero to get that, but I like what I see on the extensive character sheet the program generates. I like his spell list, which has such nifty sounding spells as 'Good move', 'Invisible hands', 'Braingate' and a bunch of other funky names that got added to my list over the levels. I wonder what a '+28 Holy cambric magnetic field shield' does. In terms of the program, it does nothing. But that doesn't matter, I still wonder what it does in an IS sense, if you get what I mean.

It's the sort of thing that the forge would commonly define as colour. However, once I've invested in it, it's not colour any more. It can return to just being color, if the player feels a reason to withdraw from it. But I'll get onto that in a future thread.

Parlour Narration
Some of the recent indie design games have contained 'Parlour narration'. Where players fill in the colour component of the dice rolls resolutions and there is no player input combined with those dice resolutions.

I wonder though, whether this is a misreading of the designers original motive. Instead perhaps the designers were groping for rules which generate material. Material a player might get excited by and invest in. It's not really 'playing the game' but instead 'playing with it' like you might play with a toy (and bond with/invest in that toy).

"But I don't need anything the game to help me with this, I already have my own investment that I'll bring along!"

I wonder that this may be the view of Forge regulars who have had more enjoyable gaming careers. It lines up with play techniques where players discuss what they'd like to have in the game, in advance of actual play.

It's a technique that hasn't really meshed with my own group and I think I now have an insight as to why. Basically my groups desire is to find investment 'in game' rather than before it. I'll use a clumsy analogy: Discussing what you want before play is like deciding as a group that your going to go to a pub…and deciding what beers you will bring with you to the pub. Rather than going and finding out what beer the pub has on tap (and trying them all until you find one you like), your going to bring along just the beers you like.

In a hobby where many keep returning to play they just don't find fun, bringing just what you like sounds a much better idea. But I wonder if it undercuts that basic agenda of exploration …of going to a pub because you want to see what that place has, rather than because you want to drink the beers your happy and comfortable with in a different place.

A few assertions there. How sound are they?

I think you have a point there.  At least, it has reminded me of a similar phenomenon: tombola horse races.  I'll explain becuase I don;t know how widespread this practice is.

A tombola is a kinda charity fundraiser with nominal competitive sports and blind auctions and so forth.  Somewhat similar to carnival entertainments and the like.  Anyway, one standard at these events is a wooden horse race that works as follows: you have 6 or so wooden horses on a track marked in squares.  Punters select a horse and bet on it, but the horses are controlled randomly.  A d6 is rolled for each horse and it moves that many squares toward the finish line.

Now obviously, like snakes and ladders, there is absolutely no capacity for the player to control or influence the horse, or even to make a meaningful selection of which horse to back.  But none of this matters because the whole event is for charity anyway - its just an excuse, really, to make a donation and keep yourself midly amused.  But people do get excited about it, and call out to their horses and so forth, and I remember as a kid being quite invested in the fate of my pocket money.  The winning horse did get some kind of reward, and so there is an aspect of real gambling, but as you point out the player is effectively a bystander rather than a really functional participant.

The gambling analogy does shed light on this idea.

Say we are playing roulette. My choice is to put my money down on red or black (or a number if I really want to lose). That choice is 50/50 so it really doesn't matter which one I pick - it is just choosing to play. I don't control what happens at all but the excitement is very real.

I think of compulsive behavior and the excitement surrounding it as part of hunting psychology.

We desire certain things (sugar, salt, fat in food, security, sex, comfort, etc.) These things are rare so when we get them we want more because we may not get them again for a while. If we were in a state of nature this hording move would be alright because nature would prevent us from getting more. In the land of surplus we have no limit on consumption so we get fat, and internet addicted. Even when we find what we want, we look for more, regardless of whither we control it or not.

Snakes and ladders is an ancient Hindu game that originally was used to teach religious concepts of reincarnation and dharma. It's telling that the US version of this game - Candyland - is about excessive consumption. Games do tell us about ourselves.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

I think you're attributing a dismissal of color as immaterial that isn't really the case.  Color is one of the components of exploration, and it is something that players explore and are interested in.  Color is important -- color is the multiplier that creates intensity out of the other components of exploration.  So the assertion that color can engage players is certainly a sound one.  That color can engage players without any of the other components involved is also sound -- snakes and ladders being a prime example.  Everything White Wolf has ever put out is another.

However, whether exploring Color without exploring the other four components is actually role-playing will stir up some... discussion, let's say.

Joshua wrote:
I think you're attributing a dismissal of color as immaterial that isn't really the case.  Color is one of the components of exploration, and it is something that players explore and are interested in.  Color is important -- color is the multiplier that creates intensity out of the other components of exploration.  So the assertion that color can engage players is certainly a sound one.  That color can engage players without any of the other components involved is also sound -- snakes and ladders being a prime example.  Everything White Wolf has ever put out is another.

However, whether exploring Color without exploring the other four components is actually role-playing will stir up some... discussion, let's say.

I suspect the word you're looking for is iconic, Bob.  Board games and card games (and video games) make extensive use of icons with powerful symbolic potential -- these allow players to immediately assign meaning to those icons in a quick, intuitive way.

Joshua wrote:
I suspect the word you're looking for is iconic, Bob.  Board games and card games (and video games) make extensive use of icons with powerful symbolic potential -- these allow players to immediately assign meaning to those icons in a quick, intuitive way.

Hi Joshua,

What are the other components of exploration you mention? I don't know the forge jargon for those (or have forgotten). As for colour creating intensity out of these other components, I think I'm more talking about a player getting so interested in a piece of color, it becomes more than colour.

However, whether exploring Color without exploring the other four components is actually role-playing will stir up some... discussion, let's say.

I can't quite put my finger on the issue I'm getting at, but it has something to do with symbolism in game art and components, and the reaction one has to them. I mean that at a deeper level than "pretty is good", too.

Callan wrote:
It's something I'm going to look into soon; that the BYO investment assumption of roleplay games is frought with entropy. Primarily because one players investment may be another players color. The BYO assumption works if every single investment brought to the table makes another player invest as well. Thus play continues as investment bounces back and forth. But in reality, people are quite different (especially as they grow older) and the ball will get dropped more often than not, until all players have investments but they inspire nothing in any other player present. Then play is at a dead halt (barring any application of illusionist techniques).

Callan wrote: It's the sort of thing that the forge would commonly define as colour. However, once I've invested in it, it's not colour any more. It can return to just being color, if the player feels a reason to withdraw from it.

Callan wrote: What are the other components of exploration you mention? I don't know the forge jargon for those (or have forgotten). As for colour creating intensity out of these other components, I think I'm more talking about a player getting so interested in a piece of color, it becomes more than colour.

Mark, I'd suggest that it wasn't the Color you guys weren't agreeing on, but the Situations -- when I say "Western" and I mean shoot-out at the OK Corral and you say "Western" and you mean O, Pioneers, it's the situation that we're differing on, not the Color (guns, dust, sky, horses).

Guess I wasn't clear. What we didn't agree about was what should BE Color. One person is grabbing on to something with all their might, saying "Here! Me! This is what the game's about. This is what should matter" and someone else is like "Why are you obsessing about THAT? It doesn't matter." Not on the CA-clash level, but strictly within the domain of Sim. Me: "If it's a Western, we've got to have a shootout!" K: "If it's a Western, I want to play poker!" T: "If it's a Western, the bad guys should be all grubby and nasty, and the good guys should be clean and sing."

Nobody is blocking anybody, nobody is proposing stuff that doesn't fit into some commonly agreeable domain of Color that ought to be there. It's just that nobody is INTO anybody else's vision. The Dream doesn't gel. We're all parallel-playing along in our own little vision of The West, and zoning out anybody else's contributions to the game EXCEPT when they impact Situation.

Which leads to basically functional, but boring, play.

Art is expensive. Physical components are expensive. Both of these are places where color can be focused. In cards and boardgames, these physical artifacts are often present. In RPGs, there is either a lack of these components, or a de-emphasis on them in favor of written color. The dollar cost of these color-related artifacts is the primary cause for their infrequent inclusion in rpgs compared to other sorts of games.

(All of the above statements are of generalizations. Please read charitably).

This line of consideration leads me to a few related thoughts:

1) What happens when those physical pieces of color are the genesis of a game rather than a tacked on afterthought?

2) Is this one primary reason behind the seeming inability of a large part of the broader game playing population to grasp rpgs?

[Admittedly, I'm biased, since I'm working on a personal project that involves that line of thought as a core design issue. However, a couple of recent threads over at rpgnet have been discussing the impact of physical components on early D&D ( in particular polyhedral dice being available only in complete sets and the presence of very weird plastic cereal monster toys on the tabletop), so that has also brought up the subject in my mind.]

3) Has the inability to produce physical bits of color been a major evolutionary pressure in rpg development? How has this affected design and play priorities?

I also have a question based on the original post regarding snakes'n'ladders compared to rpgs:

Can faux-gamism be a selling point for a game? 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?

Thoughts?

Mark wrote: Me: "If it's a Western, we've got to have a shootout!"
K: "If it's a Western, I want to play poker!"
T: "If it's a Western, the bad guys should be all grubby and nasty, and the good guys should be clean and sing."

Joshua wrote: There's nothing wrong with Color, nothing 'less' or lacking with things that are Color.  It's just a category of "things in the game that don't have a mechanical impact".  If something does have mechanical impact, it's one of the others, which are: System, Character, Setting, and Situation.

Hi Mark,

Thank you, perfect example of the disjunct I was getting at with that BYO investment thing. It's something I think snakes and ladders and similar board game techniques might be able to help with.

Hi again, Joshua,

Basically what Mark is refering to is "One mans trash is another mans treasure". Well, more the reverse of that "Ones mans investment is another mans colour".

With the exception of the clean/dirty thing, those are all situations, Mark.  Unless you wanted to shoot people to no purpose, K wanted to play poker just to play poker, and T wanted to sing about nothing.

Callan wrote: None of the other players assign significance to it, thus it isn't a situation...it fritters away to just being colour.

Nice discussion. Let me ask something and correct me if I've misinterpreted.

When I play something like Snakes and Ladders, what I enjoy are very childish things. I like picking up dice and rolling them; I like the way the Snakes look threatening (it wouldn't be the same if they were just arrows pointing down).

Now, I enjoy similar things in roleplaying games. In Dogs In The Vineyard, I like rolling huge handfuls of dice; in My Life With Master, I like the three differently shaped and coloured dice which I can play for; in the Shab Al-Hiri Roach, I like the cards with instructions on them.

(I wouldn't enjoy Dogs In The Vineyard half as much, for example, if the dice were rolled by a computer.)

Are these things colour, exactly? If they are, they seem to be a very different sort of colour from the cockatrice windvane. They have nothing to do with the shared world the players have created. What I enjoy is playing with the physical trappings of the game: how is that categorised?

Graham

Graham wrote: What I enjoy is playing with the physical trappings of the game: how is that categorised?

Callan wrote: Thank you, perfect example of the disjunct I was getting at with that BYO investment thing. It's something I think snakes and ladders and similar board game techniques might be able to help with.

TonyLB wrote:

Graham wrote: What I enjoy is playing with the physical trappings of the game: how is that categorised?

Toy Quality?

So, is the general thrust of this thread that game designers should give more serious consideration to Color as an element of design than they usually do?

komradebob wrote:
So, is the general thrust of this thread that game designers should give more serious consideration to Color as an element of design than they usually do?

talysman wrote:

komradebob wrote:
So, is the general thrust of this thread that game designers should give more serious consideration to Color as an element of design than they usually do?

it seems that way, except that I get the impression this thread is more about the physical embodiments of Color. which leads to a problem. I don't agree that studying Snakes and Ladders is going to help RPG design very much. first, because as has been mentioned, the Color (and the Fiction linked to Color) has no effect on play; and second, although physical props like maps, cards, and character sheets can add a little to the quality of the game, the real board, tokens, and pawns in RPGs is in the Fiction, and the Fiction can be changed during play; that's the essential nature of an RPG.

I think also that in ordinary games versus RPGs, it's all Color and System, with Character, Setting and Situation being part of Color. the Color is not very important, it's just a gimmick to sell the game; all the real play is about System and the people around the table. thus, board games and card games can have some benefit to someone designing the social rules for pure Nar/Gam RPGs, but they won't be as useful for Sim RPGs or the rules that support Exploration in Nar/Gam.

I would say that Ron's review of octaNe (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/reviews/25/), in particular his summation and suggestions at the end, has discussed some of this as well.  He seems to be saying that Jared, sort of accidentally, made Color the real engine that drives the game.  A happy coincidence, I guess, since Color is the whole selling-point in the first place.

Aaron

I disagree a bit with some of the discussion of Snakes and Ladders. You guys keep saying S&L is like gambling---no, it IS a gamble as defined by Ron's Gamism article. There are basically two aspects to gamist play, "crunch" and "gamble". Both are forms of challenge. Crunch forces players to use their skill, while gamble forces players to use their Guts. Different games put different emphasis on each. Chess is pure crunch, Craps is pure gamble. Even though the players in S&L have no input beyond rolling dice, it still represents a challenge.

The excitement comes from the gamble. Within a gamist setting, people want to win. Period. Even if nothing is "at stake", the willingness to gamble shows a player's Guts, so there's still an investment. Color may contribute to a games excitement, but its the gamble (aka challenge) that creates the excitement.

Callen, what types of games do you play? Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I have the impression you have gamist tendencies. I wonder if the lack of success you've had with BYO invenstment systems is related to CA. But maybe I'm off there.

Joshua:

Ah, you're going with a 'majority rules' sort of definition.  The bulk of the group thinks it's Color, so then it is Color.  From my angle, there's no group definition until there's group consensus, so if the bulk of the group thinks it's Color and one guy thinks it's Situation, I'd say that it's Color for them and Situation for him.

So have we been in screaming agreement? ;)

Are these things colour, exactly? If they are, they seem to be a very different sort of colour from the cockatrice windvane. They have nothing to do with the shared world the players have created. What I enjoy is playing with the physical trappings of the game: how is that categorised?

I don't agree that studying Snakes and Ladders is going to help RPG design very much. first, because as has been mentioned, the Color (and the Fiction linked to Color) has no effect on play; and second, although physical props like maps, cards, and character sheets can add a little to the quality of the game, the real board, tokens, and pawns in RPGs is in the Fiction, and the Fiction can be changed during play; that's the essential nature of an RPG.

Callan wrote:
John:

I don't agree that studying Snakes and Ladders is going to help RPG design very much. first, because as has been mentioned, the Color (and the Fiction linked to Color) has no effect on play; and second, although physical props like maps, cards, and character sheets can add a little to the quality of the game, the real board, tokens, and pawns in RPGs is in the Fiction, and the Fiction can be changed during play; that's the essential nature of an RPG.

No effect on play? Are you sure? I've just given examples of increased excitement and a desire to pursue that excitement. This is what drives play...it's lack of mechanical effect doesn't mean much if a player starts making all his game actions revolve around colour that he's invested in. Rather than affecting the mechanics you affecting the player. That's a pretty big game effect!

On the second problem, I'm not sure what you mean. How is it a problem if it can be changed?

Hi Tim,

I'm gamist, part repressed narrativist. Have enjoyed D&D 3.0 a great, while grinding teeth at the gamist potential of Rifts (unsupportive in terms of my needs, in its rules).

It's interesting. When I wrote about it I didn't really think of snakes and ladders as gamist. Even though I wrote about all the bio feedback about winning. I guess because it lacks something I'm heavily invested in - player input. So in a way, although there's excitement for me, it just seems like colour because it's not my prefered type of gamism. Thus it's that 'ones mans treasure is another mans colour' thing again.

Interesting, because it's not gamism for me yet, yet I am invested.

BUT, what about the second example of progress quest? Perhaps a sim desire...remember how I want to explore just what braingate does, etc? What do you think?

John:

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?

talysman wrote: 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?

Joshua wrote:

talysman wrote: 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.

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.

Just a quick note on a side point:

komradebob wrote: 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?

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

Rob wrote:

Callan wrote: 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.

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.

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.