Tiny Game

Tiny Game

Tiny Game is actually a roleplaying game, but being as that it’s so tiny, I wanted a short title.

Tiny Game fits in a nutshell: players tell a story in a round. Each player’s turn consists of as much story as they want to tell, unless they’re interrupted by another player. If they’re interrupted, any players who want to propose a direction for the story to take in general terms, and everyone with a proposal rolls a die. Roll off ties. High roll takes over narration, which starts with them describing how their proposal goes. Continue until end of story.

That’s Tiny Game. Here’s what it’s for: as a critical tool, examine how a given game or design-in-progress provides more than Tiny Game. It’s essentially just naked Fortune-in-middle conflict resolution, but it seems to me that it could be said that there are games out there that are just a dressed up FIMCR. Hell, you could even frame D&D this way, if you had a mind too.

Bargaining and Stakes

Now, I may wind up eating all of this after reading Polaris, but here’s the thought: every stakes-setting/CR/FIM style system I’m familiar with has some variant of a free-and-clear where players discuss what the stakes are for a particular conflict. But only rarely have I personally seen the free-and-clear work on a level other than the situational. In other words “if he’s doing that, I wanna do this instead…” etc. But there’s something appealling about the idea of establishing stakes such that they’re of equal value, somehow.

What I’m thinking about is a “libre-clear” stage, where everyone can offer stakes for either side of an argument, but ultimately there’s a sort of bidding/betting/bargaining aspect to the exchange. Consider poker: your stakes have to match your opponents, eventually you show, and the winner gets the stakes. So, stake-setting by analogy to back room poker, where players will dramatically offer their watches and tie-tacks for whatever value the other players will grant them.

And as a final disconnected thought: Jon Tweet’s pleasant trope of the High Stakes Poker – some mystical force empowers the game to wager all kinds of abstract things – years of life, talent, skill, beauty. There’s a whole game in that concept, where characters are built to be players at that table.

Levels of Story and Extended Conflicts (while stirring polenta)

Premise: I’ve been thinking for a while about indefinite nesting of storytelling elements – that there’s a natural but hypothetically unnecessary division into Story, Situation, Scene, Conflict, Task.

What I’m thinking is based on the Heroquest style Conflict resolution: if something is worth playing out, break it down. Except where Heroquest (and really, too many game to name) limit that to combat – or in other words, sub-Scene level events, what I’m considering is the same idea writ large.

Quick treatment: game begins with a story proposal. Players have characters and all that, and somebody (the GM?) says “Okay: here’s the rough sketch for the story.” And the requirement is that the proposal be framed as a conflict of some kind. Very high level, ideally around a theme, but a conflict.

Now, the group as a whole decides somehow whether to let this go – that they’re willing to let things run their course, (in other words “not interested,” or better still “lets do what happens if we pass on this”), or that they’ll resolve the whole Event with a single roll, or they want to break the event down in to Sub-Events.

Sub-Events get treated the same way – but they ultimately have to resolve the Super-Event. In other words, the group produces Sub-Events until they wrap up Event that spawned them. But each Sub-Event can be broken down further and further.

There’s a certain amount of stuff to be answered on this. Like how does non-Conflict stuff fit in. If we need an Event of “and they travel to Europe” what do we do with that? And how do we encourage little diversions and amplifications of themes and motifs and whatnot?

That’s for thinking on.

The Hive

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, and it came to mind recently and I wanted to jot it down while it’s fresh and handy.

Basically, this is the idea: packet switching, or parallel processing applied to the business space. As time goes on, and more people get the entrepenuerial bug, and the web makes it easier to set up a storefront, there’s a lot of people who are passionately pursuing one thing and doing it well. In theory, if they could coordinate better, they could rival the forces of giant corporations.

So, the notion is, reduce the barrier to enter business. Have a service that provides not only a virtual office, but networking with other small businesses, initial business licensing, non-professional legal and practice advice, insurance etc.

Consider that there do exist businesses to do logistics on a large scale. And the virtual office is not exactly a new idea. But why not a single reverse-incubator? Rather than buy or start little notional businesses, instead provide a set of services to them.

And put it in a family of commerce style atmosphere. Not the creepy “you just started a business, let us leech on your idea” but instead a lubricated business flow between family businesses, and mutual support.

Specific examples:

• A single-day rental office / conference room. The Hive’s central HQ would have offices and receptionists etc, for short term rental. Your sideline can have somewhere to meet with clients etc without having to maintain the offices year-round.

• Recommended publication services, web designers, web brokerages, telecomm, etc. Throw business back and forth within the Hive.

• Group rates. Be able to provide insurance, lending, benefits to member shops at a larger scale rate.

Untitled Committee Game

This is the idea for the game that wanted to be my second entry for Game Chef 2006. (Ingredients would be Committee, 2 hours, Ancient, Emotion. Since this is not an entry, I’m ignoring all that.)

Basically, the players start as a Committee of Ethical Values or some such. One player proposes a societal concept (like, cybernetic consciousnesses in cyberspace, or occupants of a long term space station, or an alternate Renaissance, or even untrained sex therapy workers) and then the group as a whole develops a system of laws, or an ethical structure or some such. The system has to be written down.

Then, each player gets a chance to break the system. They present a case – perhaps to a Council of Judgement – that’s specifically ambiguous under the system as codified. The Council votes secretly on whether the conduct is correct or not, along with the element of the code that supports or condemns the action, and the presenter gets points for wildly disparate results, while the Council gets points for unified judgement.

Rules would probably be along the lines of who can say what to whom. Probably Judges can only address the supplicant directly, and no sneaky leading questions.

Scoring notions:

• Supplicant gets Support x Condemn x Articles Cited
• The Code gets MAX(Support, Condemn)² x Judges

Which should score high for the Code if Judges agree, and higher for the Supplicant if they don’t. If a Supplicant scores highest, then that player wins, but the Council loses.