Designing Fun: A Method to Identify Experiential Elements in Analog Abstract Games

To play a game, players interact with the game system by following rules. Upon interaction, different properties emerge. The experience of fun is one of the fundamental emergent properties that players seek from a game. There are many conceptual viewpoints of fun; yet, little research on how a rule system’s qualities help create fun. We present a qualitative empirical method that connects the players’ fun experience in context to the rule system. We describe the protocol for the method and its rationales. Two case studies employing our method on abstract analog (non-digital) games are presented. Our method helps researchers identify experiential elements of games and design-attributes to modulate them. The design-attributes also aid in interpreting the conditions generated by the rule system for fun to emerge. Lastly, we discuss the method’s strengths in terms of findings and potential applications in research and practice.

A Walk in a Box: Understanding Board Game Immersion

Hybrid Board Game Design Guidelines

Hybrid board games combine non-digital and digital elements to introduce a new kind of game experiences. In this study, we present 17 design guidelines for hybrid board games. These guidelines are the result of an iterative process of workshopping with industry experts and academic researchers, supported by developer interviews and player survey. They are presented as starting points for hybrid board game design and aim to help the designers to avoid common pitfalls and evaluate different trade-offs.

Joy Family: Japanese Board Games in the Post-War Shōwa Period

This paper draws on new archival and historical sources to survey the major developments in Japanese board games in the postwar Shōwa era (1945–89), including the import of American games, the emergence of Japan’s wargame culture, and the structural foundations of the ancient Japanese game of sugoroku. In particular, this paper identifies key cultural, economic, and design moments that led to Bandai’s unprecedented yet overlooked analog game output in the 1980s.

From Breaking To Making

Enacting aporia: Roger Caillois’ game typology as formalist methodology

This game analysis experimentally transposes Louis Hjelmslev's linguistic methodology, for logically deducing semiotic schema from a given text, to the analysis of games. Roger Caillois' fourfold model of game type rubrics is therefore reconceptualized, as a logically coherent analytic framework, from which an analysis might proceed indefinitely. Such analysis was practiced on a Dutch translation of the board game Lord of the Rings, to observe how this game manifests Caillois' rubrics of agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (role-playing), and ilinx (disruptive play). Game studies methods akin to Hjelmslev's work already exist, and Caillois' efforts are often reconceptualized. However, this present work finds valuable avenues of inquiry in synthesizing these two thinkers. In extending Hjelmslev's work, stratified images of interlinked categories and components now appear at play in games. By reconceptualizing Caillois' efforts, those two axes, along which his four rubrics seem divided, now point to valuable lines of future inquiry.

Digitising Boardgames: Issues and Tensions

In this paper, we discuss the different ways in which modern European boardgames (“Eurogames”) are converted for digital play. We review digitised versions of three popular tabletop boardgames: Puerto Rico, Agricola and Ascension. Using these examples, we demonstrate the tension between the interaction metaphor of the original analogue medium and the metaphor of a digital game. We describe the importance of housekeeping chores to gameplay and position them as a form of articulation work, which is typically hidden by digital implementations. Further, we demonstrate the types of information that are created through digital play and discuss how this influences game play of both digital and physical boardgames.

Rules in Computer Games Compared to Rules in Traditional Games

Michael Liebe argues that Salen and Zimmerman's interpretation of Huizinga's magic circle does not apply to computer games. Liebe's insight reveals not only a different relation for computer games to the magic circle, but also hints at a difference in the nature of rules in computer games. Jesper Juul's comparison of non-digital sports to simulations of those sports highlights a missing aspect in understanding how rules in computer games are of a different nature than those of non-computer games: rules as flexibly defining real-time spatial interactions. Rules in computer games are more like laws of physics, rules in non-computer games are more like laws of society. Besides meta rules such as tournament arrangements, only a handful of "rules" - as the word is applied to non-computer games - exist for nearly all computer games. Moreover, such rules are largely the same: use standard input, and don't alter the game.

Socially Adaptable Games

This paper introduces the concept of Social Adaptability, a characteristic of games that are explicitly designed to function in changing social environments, and provides initial guidelines for how to design games so that they have this characteristic. The guidelines are based upon analysis of related concepts, types of social roles players can have in games, and how social environments in games can change during gameplay.

Exploring anonymity in cooperative board games

This study was done as a part of a larger research project where the interest was on exploring if and how gameplay design could give informative principles to the design of educational activities. The researchers conducted a series of studies trying to map game mechanics that had the special quality of being inclusive, i.e., playable by a diverse group of players. This specific study focused on designing a cooperative board game with the goal of implementing anonymity as a game mechanic. Inspired by the gameplay design patterns methodology (Björk & Holopainen 2005a; 2005b; Holopainen & Björk 2008), mechanics from existing cooperative board games were extracted and analyzed in order to inform the design process. The results from prototyping and play testing indicated that it is possible to implement anonymous actions in cooperative board games and that this mechanic made rather unique forms of gameplay possible. These design patterns can be further developed in order to address inclusive educational practices.