This last weekend, something incredible happened: I went to
my first PAX, PAX East in Boston. I've
been to conventions before, and I'd heard the hype surrounding PAX before. Some of my friends were PAX veterans, and
they were in attendance. Things were,
more or less, fantastic, from a relatively quick check-in process to a massive,
milling collective of humanity circulating a game floor, scrabbling to get a
look at new properties (the most popular of which seemed to be the Borderlands
Pre-Sequel, whose four hour wait time eclipsed everything else in the hall). The enthusiasm was infectious, and the number
of booth staff who I spotted running around, actually engaging with the
convention neatly illustrated why PAX works so well: it's a convention run by
the people who it wants to attend, built largely on their labor and generosity,
with an eye towards presenting an environment that welcomes everyone and
celebrates a genuine, unalloyed enthusiasm for games and game products.
There were some people there who didn't fit the mold. The convention center staff, while all
perfectly nice people, clearly weren't PAX people. I met also met a staffer running a board-game
table based on one of the first games I ever started playing competitively who
was clearly unfamiliar with the original property, and seemed unsure of how to
talk about the game she was wearing a shirt advertising. But these were the exceptions to the rule of
PAX: you come to PAX because you want to be there. You bring the positivity that people have
denied nerd culture for too long to
every interaction you have. You share
your love of games, your Mountain Dew, and your opinions, however filthy. At one point, Jerry Holkins, Penny-Arcade writer and convention
co-founder, sat next to me and some friends, engaged in playing Munchkin, and proceeded to sit down and
play an Adventure Time based card
game with someone I didn't recognize.
The result was queer, but remarkable: this e-celebrity was just using
the space he created the way everyone else was, playing board games in the
board games section with a friend. Me
and my friends, and everyone else nearby, just kept doing our own thing, not
for lack of noticing him, but out of respect for his right to enjoy PAX the
same way everyone else was. A sort of
silent "right on." But that
said, I'm not bringing this up because I want to discuss Jerry's sojourn into
the mechanics of Finn and Jake. I'm only
partially bringing this up as an oblique brag.
I'm primarily bringing this up because he sat down next to us during a
three hour game of Munchkin, which is a thing that should never happen, and I'd
like to talk about why it did.
To the uninitiated, Munchkin is a card game produced by
Steve Jackson. The mechanics are a
little complex and heavy on reading, but the defining characteristic of the
game is that the complex rules, once penetrated, are actually pretty simple,
and disagreements about those rules is resolved largely through argument. By merit of design, that keeps rule
discussion from paralyzing play, and incorporates the known issue of
board-game-nerd-arguments into the flow of play. Games usually take one to two hours. A three hour game represents a plodding,
mammoth failure on the part of its players, an inability to agree on even a
single rule. A three hour game of
Munchkin would have to be rife with rule arguments to be justified. But we didn't argue about rules more than
once or twice, and, despite this, half our players had time to download and
install the Munchkin app during our game and get a feel for using it.
So why did a simple game take us so long?
Rate of play.
When you're playing a board game, there's an expected amount
of time to make a move - chess goes so far as to codify this time in certain
modes of play. The notion is clear: you
probably shouldn't be taking more than a minute or two to make a move, more often
no more than a few seconds. If you're
not thinking about your move before your turn, you're not actually playing the
game. You're just playing your turn. But repeatedly, our players would peruse
their cards at agonizing pace, making moves, taking them back, then re-making
the same move. Some of it was clumsy
learning, but more often, it was poor playing, muddling through the simplest of
moves (like equipping or selling items) and ignoring the rest of the table
during through-play. By the end of the
game, the number of players thrashing through their turns was reduced, but
there was still a great deal of hand wringing that ended in "well, I can't
do what I wanted to do," followed by a defeated sigh and a quick
fold. The people who did this did it in
other games as well, and it made me realize something: the problem with
complicated games isn't necessarily their complexity, it's the manner in which
that complexity is engaged with on the game board.
In life, we are always capable of generating a single
massive generalization between two arbitrarily generated categories. Board games are no different, so I'm going to
generate a distinction here between two kinds of board game players: players
whose goal is to optimize each turn, and players who, while concerned with making
certain kinds of moves, are willing to permit mistakes to happen, or make
sub-optimal moves during the course of play.
This is a particularly tenuous generalization, since I kind of split it
up into three categories, and because players will sometimes shift between
categories during rounds of play, but the big distinction to consider here is
between people who engage with each turn as if it will win or lose the game
(which, to be fair, is true, in an absolute fashion) and people who engage with
the game as a whole as an operation which determines an outcome. The notion is that turn optimizers often have
trouble looking more than one or two turns ahead to a potential move, or that
they gear their play towards maximizing potential in a way that actually
occludes the development of that potential by stalling rate of play. By attempting to do everything during a
single move, these players often give other players more time to plan their
moves, or expose their own thought process and, in doing so, undermine the
machinations guiding their optimized movements.
They also, by focusing so monomaniacally on a single move, stall out the
game for other players. That means
they're not playing the game against a table, but rather playing it against the
game's systems, a far more challenging task; consider poker and blackjack. You play games of poker against other
players, but in blackjack, you'll usually play against the house. The cards are stacked in the house's favor
and, as such, if you want to win games, it's a better idea to play poker,
instead of blackjack, even though you're playing against four people instead of
one: each of those people is playing by the same ruleset you are, whereas in
blackjack, you are literally playing against a stacked deck, a ruleset designed
to make you fail. The house always wins,
in the long run, and in a game, played properly, the rules will almost always
beat the players. The trick, then, is
actually outlasting other players, or overcoming the obstacles the system
presents to you a little bit better or faster than they do.
This phenomena of turn slowdown takes on a new twist in role
playing games, where characters, rather than attempting to win a game overall,
are playing to forward a story. Turn
optimization in role playing games takes on a whole new meaning, as players who
engage in it don't necessarily emerge in opposition to the systems surrounding
them, but rather the notion of narrative.
In Dungeons and Dragons, for
example, a turn is intended to represent roughly six seconds of action for each
player. A player usually shouldn't spend
more than a minute or two playing through their turn, though sometimes resolving
particularly elaborate actions (like, let's say, a cleric turning a large
number of undead with separate attack rolls) can reasonably be expected to take
more time, by merit of multiple dice rolls, outcomes, and effects that all need
to be kept track of. New players,
learning their abilities, will often want to explore different potential
actions, but players, once they get into a character, should generally move
towards play acting, that is to say, acting out the way they think the
character they've created would behave in a given situation. A good example would be Mike Krahulik, during
his first D&D game, opting to
embrace his wizard's brash description and, ergo, attacking wildly without
regard for his party members. Even
though his moves were sometimes sub-optimal, the game moved forward, the
narrative moved forward and, for the most part, play went smoothly.
This relies on an underlying concern for narrative that not
every D&D game, or every role
playing game for that matter, actually presents, but the problem of the rate of
play being slowed by a player or two who attempts to optimize play in a way
that is, almost inevitably, sub-optimal for the table, remains. Optimizing players aren't usually concerned
with things like inhabiting a character, so how does one square that
circle? How does one engage these
players on the same level as everyone else, following their learning phase?
There are easy methods - using a timer or an hourglass to
force action inside of a limited time span, releasing live bees into the room
during delayed turns, instituting a "turn skip" protocol - but all of
these methods break immersion, and potentially curtail the actions of other
players, who might simply have exceptionally long or complex action resolutions. A more involved, and more effective method,
is confronting the player in question and actually talking to them about rates
of play, but this relies on a particular relationship outside of the game
context that allows players to engage in conversations that, to be frank, can
be a bit incendiary. Not everyone you
play Catan with can be relied upon
not to smash the board in a fit of rage.
I'd contend that the most elegant solution exists on the
design side of things. Odd as it might
sound, during this same weekend, I played a trivia game with the same group
that actually solved this issue by making player engagement a mechanic: players
were encouraged to, even rewarded for, shouting out their answers as quickly as
possible. If you didn't engage with the
game, you couldn't win. No delay of
turn, no lag time, just movement. Alas,
I couldn't tell you how to translate this operation to games with more
complicated rulesets. Perhaps, by making
turn time limits social rather than mechanical, you could generate a framework
that accelerates play, but even then a player obsessed with optimizing action
can sometimes interrupt play in a way that artificially lengthens it, by doing
things like interrupting or attempting to interrupt another player's action for
perceived gain. I'm sure there are
mechanics that I haven't considered, things like ticking clocks, or stacking
penalties for failing to act within a particular time frame, but at present
none of them actually come to mind. The
simplest, most elegant solution here seems, as usual, to be direct
conversation. Assuming you don't play
games with assholes which, reliably, will not be true for any given table.
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